I have recently bought a new HDD, 40GB in size. After buying it, I hooked it up to my computer. When I switch my computer on, the HDD does not load and stops working as it says it is looking for the 'Pri Master'. If I enter Set-up and ask the computer to auto detect new hard drive, it crashes. My friend suggested many reasons as to why it doesn't work, one suggestion that came up was that my Mother Board would not recognise a HDD of this size, I suspect this may be the problem. If so, then I will need to update my BIOS and I'm unsure of how to go about this. I'm unsure of the make and model of my Mother Board, however, my current BIOS is: American Megatrends A615601 V2.2B5 042899 Can anyone help by suggesting any other reasons and how to repair them, or, by letting me know how to update my BIOS? Thanks!

The HDD manufacturer may have an overlay program that you can use and may have come with the HDD. A PCI IDE adapter card could also help.

harddrives must be formatted before they can be used. boot off a floppy boot disk and type "fdisk" and then format it. [no quote marks of course]. fdisk help and here also. it may be the size, but more likey it is the cable length. old motherboards dont accept ide cable longer than 18". go to hoda.com and download wcpuid and it will tell you your motherboard make/model.

i better go into detail, but you could really read it on the fdisk sites. basicly you first type fdisk, then a pop up ask do you want to selecta disk larger than 512mb type y and enter. then press 1 to select a primary partiton and allocate ALL the disk space and partition it. this should automatically make the disk the "active partition". so after you do that and it finnishes. get back to command prompt and type "format c:/" it pretty easy after that, just breeze through it, then after reformating, install the os. read the links for better detail, but thats how you do it.

1. Make sure all cables are plugged into hdd and into mobo. mobo end tends to come adrift. :) 2. Make sure hdd jumpers are set to MASTER 3. Use correct end of ide cable to connect to drive. 4. If bios does not recognize hdd automatically (older bios), then use the hard disk detection option in bios and select the one with LBA. These older bioses are a hold over from the PC/XT/AT/386/486 days. No overlay needed this way. Overlay in large disks creates too many sectors for defrag to handle (it will throw a hissy fit and refuse to defrag [out of memory]). Charles

are you all nuts (no offense) the SIMPLEST explanation is that he doesnt have the jumper settings on the hdd correct. you have to set it as slave or master etc. other then that your old mobo might not recognise it i had lots of experience w/ hard drive installing etc and it probably is the jumper settings by the sounds of it..?