I just recently got a seagate barracuda 7200.7 st3160021a 160gb ide Hd. Its been problematic at the least. OS fail to boot with it in, usualy freezing on the mounting point. in the bios the drive shows up as 137.4 gb ocasional and sometimes a more correct # of 153gb or something like that. I've double check the jumpers I have the 2 sets of pins next to the ide cable jumped ( master with non-ata slave) because it has a slave cd rom on the same cable... yet it still gives bios atapi errors and fails to boot an OS. any suggestions to get the most out of this drive?

Reconfigure your jumpers for master *with* ATA slave. The CD-ROM is ATA and the ATAPI error is refering to the CD-ROM, not the hard disk. ATAPI: ATA Packet Interface, the ATA/IDE standard for CD-ROM, tape and removable drives. Stuart

Firefox, Can you check on the following areas thus narrowing down the problem A)Use another IDE cable.Use another IDE slot without the CD-ROm connected B)What make and model is your motherboard.Old motherboards sometimes need a BIOS update to get the 137 GB barrier.Meaning hard disks over 137 GB to be recongnised need BIOS updates. C)Try to check with another hard disk and see if that also cause an ATAPI error. D)If possible obtain another hard disk.Install SP2 since this will enable LBA 48BIT addressing which will break the 160GB barrier E)In your BIOS are you getting full 160GB.Does it show Seagate Barracuda 160GB. These are the areas where I think you should look more into. Take care.Post your reply

i do not know what the label looks like on this drive but in my experence some labels showing jumper positions assume you have the drive with the label facing downwards when you view the jumpers and some the otherway round. If the pins are numbered it is easier to get it right, but sometimes its not that easy to tell which is right way round.

http://www.48bitlba.com/ 98% of the population is asleep. The other 2% are staring around in complete amazement, abject terror, or both.

When I set the cd-rom to slave and the hd to master (with ata slave) nothing shows up in the bios, just get not installed. since my drive was returning 153**** on some ocasions in the bios, that leads me to believe is not a bios issue with size limitation. I've uses 2 80pin ide cables and 1 regular all with the same results. other drives work fine. Is there a eeprom flash I can get to flash the hd chips back to gneric settings? I think that might be part of the problem? the drive is lock capable, I jsut can't find anything on seagates web site to do this with.