'No Fixed Disk Present' Message

I'm trying to format a hard drive, and keep getting the message 'No Fixed Disk Present'. I'm booting off of a known good Win98 boot disk, and am trying to FDISK and Format. This actually occurs on two different hard drives, a Maxtor and a Western Digital. The hard drives were working when I removed them from another unit.
I set the HD for 'Master', double checked the IDE connector to make sure pin 1 was right, power to HD ok.
Thanks in advance.
Bruce

 

Did you try setting the hd to single, or if it is an older compaq machine, cable select?
bob

 

Have you changed the CMOS settings as appropriate for the drive(s)?

 

I did set the drive for 'CS', since it is an older Compaq. I finally got the system to approve 'FDISK' and 'Format' only after I cleared the CMOS with the jumper.
By the way, could someone tell me the correct procedure for clearing the CMOS. I put the jumper in 'Clear', rebooted the machine and ran 'FDISK' and 'FORMAT' while the jumper was still set on 'Clear'.
Should I have shut down the computer as soon as it booted up ok on the boot disk and would accept the FDISK command and put the jumper back to 'Normal', then run 'FDISK' and 'FORMAT'?
Thanks,
Bruce

 

Normally, all you do is short the "Clear" pins for a few seconds - no more than 30 seconds usually - then put the jumper back in the "Run" position.

Power on the system, enter the CMOS to make any necessary changes, then go on and run fdisk & format.

Clearing the CMOS isn't normally required if all you're planning on is to format the drive and re-install Windows.

 

Cliffh,
I realize that normally you don't have to clear the CMOS, but for some reason this unit would not allow me to run FDISK without showing a 'No Fixed Disk Present' message. I tried setting the HD to Master, Slave and CS, but still the same message. Only after clearing the CMOS and leaving the HD on CS, was I able to run FDISK.
If you have any theories, let me know.
Bruce

 

My best guess would be that the hard drive parameters in the CMOS needed to be changed. There are some settings (in some systems) other than just the Cyl/Hds/Sec settings - things like 32 bit access, LBA etc.

Hopefully this isn't one of those Compaq's that used a small non-DOS partition on the hard drive to store some of the CMOS settings. If it is, you'll want to download the correct Softpaq from Compaq's web site to re-create that partition.