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Hi I recently purchased a larger hard drive (80 GB as opposed to 12 BG) to put in my computer, however the computer will not detect the hard drive at startup. I have tested the hard drive on my new pc (P4 3.0 GHZ, 512 ram) and it detects it (so the jumper settings are correct). The new hard drive is 7200 rpm and I do not know what the old one is but I assume it is slower, this is why the new hard drive will be a master.
So what exactly happens?
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with the new hard drive in (alone and on master setting) the computer detects the master disk as none. It still picks up the 2 cd rom drives.Can someone please help me with my problem.
are you useing a 80 wire IDE cable or the old 40 wire cable ? if a 40 wire ,replace it with a 80 wire. Are you intering into the bios setup and being sure it is set for auto detect?
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Hi
This detection (or lack there of), is it the bios or your OS?
The bios should (in my experience -generally) still get a hard drive ID "string" from the drive, even if the bios has a drive size limit which is less than 80GB. There are some motherboard/ drive setups that result in nothing being detected though.
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It is at bios, the pc is set up so that when it starts it looks for all the drives. With the old hard drive in it detects it as primary master, no primary slave, the burner as secondry master and the plain cd drive as secondry slave. I still have to check the 40 wire thing, how do you tell?
And no I have tryed the cable both ways, if it is upside down it fails to detect any other drives as well.
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did you buy a western digital hard drive, if did & have jumper as master with no slave drive present, the bios will not see harddrive so remove jumper & see if bios now detects the drive. it is one of the reasons i don't like wd
david
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okay I think I have found the difference between the cables, one apears to have many lines one does not have as many (detailed huh) The other computer had a 80 wire so i tryed it in the computer I'm inserting the HD in but it still does not work, thats not to say it doesn't need one but it might only be part of the problem. I say that because the other pc (P4 3.0GHZ, 512 RAM) does detect it.
It is a Western Digital but i have already tryed removing the jumper, and the P4 machine detects it even with the jumper in.
.;. so this means the hard drive is not faulty, the jumper is in the right place and the reson it is not detecting has something to do with something that the P4 machine has but the older mashine does not.
the system specs for the P4 machine are: 3.0 GHz, 512RAM, XP Pro, Axion sapphire mainboard with ATI Radeon 9100IGP, 120G 7200 rpm hdd. As i said before it has the 80 wire IDE cable.
can someone tell me what I need to fix my problem?
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are you putting wd into another computer not p4 & what is specs of other computer. stay with 40 pin cable for now for diagnostic purposes as some 80 wire data cables has 1 pin disabled in slave connector & won't see a drive in the slave connector unless there is a drive in master connector
david
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Check to see if you can set the Primary master for LBA mode (large HD). You may need to update your BIOS.
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OK A friend told me to try it in a secondry slot, so I did but the computer still not detect it, however instead of declaring that there is no drive it sat and tryed to detect something. I went into cmos to auto detect in there but it just tryed to autodetect for about 5 minutes and then i realised it wasn't gunna find it so i rebooted.
Does this mean it may just be a problem with my bios that could be easily updated?
Where do you get updates from?As for previos posts the pc I'm putting the western digital is a P3 450MHZ 128RAM
What is LBA mode and how do u set it?
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You can get BIOS updates from the motherboard manufacturers website.
LBA mode is a setting for the access mode of the IDE channel. If you have the new HD on the primary IDE as master, in the BIOS look under Standard CMOS settings or IDE settings to find Access Mode.
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Is the new hard drive formatted? Also got the Western Digital for the Alternate jumpers settings for old computers.
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OKay Yesterday somthing in the computer shortcircuited(I believe it was the motherboard) so the computer is now getting fixed by a professional who will also attempt to fix the hard drive problem. But thanks for all your help and support!
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I just bought an 80 gig 7200 rpm WD drive...and it wouldn't detect it after so many tries...it turns out that under fdisk...it wasn't checked as Active partition : \
it's worth a try
/end
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