Windows Setup does not see entire HD

Just bought a new comptuer barebones and i am having a hard time trying to get windows installed.

I have tried using two different hard drives.

On the boot up some times the autodetect hard drive comes up with unsual names for the hard drives, such as my Maxtor drive being called a Laxtor drive with some other random characters. The Cmos has no problem detecting the size and attributes of the hard drive. Tried to fdisk one of the drives and fdisk said that the HD was only 8 gigs, when it should be 60 gigs.

When i run the windows setup from cd one of the hard drives causes a partition manager dll file blue screen and freezes. The other hard drive attempts to format the 8 gigs and ends with a disk problem error. The IDE cable is in correctly, any ideas?

THANKS

 

Could the cmos battery need replacing? I have heard of batteries being dead on new motherboards. Other than that make sure all cables are properly seated in theri respective slots. Since your new drive is a Maxtor then download Maxblast to set up the drive.

 

What does the BIOS say? Is it the latest version? Older BIOS have probs with new HDDs.

I'd use a win98 boot disk to run fdisk and format the partitions on each drive.

 

On further thought, think you should RMA the box for a replacement, preferably with a better mobo.

 

Yup, you've got hardware problems for sure. It could be the hard drive itself, a faulty data cable or a faulty IDE controller on the motherboard. Or possibly even faulty RAM. But if it's a new PC, it's probably easiest just to exchange it rather than try and trace the exact cause of the problem.

 

Thanks for all of the quick responces. This was my first post on bbs and it was nice to actually have a question anwsered quickly. I am a lazy bum and have taken more than 30 days to try to get this thing running, so i am past the RMA phase. Just ordered a replacement motherboard, lets see if i can't get this baby working. I'll keep you updated. Thanks agian.