My student daughter's PC is based around a four year old, Abit AT TX5 M/B, with i430TX chipset. 233pentium processor. 64mb ram. The bios supports LBA for the HD. Tseng Labs 2.5mb Graphics card. It has a 230w power supply. It runs well with a 6gb Seagate HD installed. The PC also works OK with an old 1Gb Quantum Fireball installed. I am trying to install for her, a new 40Gb Maxtor HD. (it is an ATA100 5400rpm drive, though I installed it with a 40 pin cable). Unfortunately the bios doesn't detect the HD during POST at all, either as master or slave on either IDE channel. I have tried Autodetect in the bios but that just hangs the PC. I have installed the most recent bios update to no effect. I tried another HD drive with the same result (unfortunately that was a Maxtor 40Gb as well) Both maxtor drives run perfectly well on my, newer, AMD500 PC. I half expected problems with the bios not recognizing the full 40Gb but I didn't expect the drive not to be visible at all. Can the power supply not be delivering enough current? I know modern drives are relatively quiet but I can't hear either of the Maxtors spinning, even with the case cover off, and the HD LED on the case doesn't flash either. Is it a problem with Maxtor and older chipsets? Does anyone have any suggestions, I'm now stumped.

Maybe your student daughter's PC does not support a 40 GM hard drive, i think you should install two 6 GM hard drives. or try installing a 20 GM hard drive if it works then put two of them.

A motherboard of that age will not support the 40GB drive without an overlay program. This is usually supplied on floppy with Maxtor drives. If you don't have it, you can download the MaxBlast package from the Maxtor home site. Since the system probably will not operate above ATA33, the cable is OK. The 80 conductor cable is only needed for ATA100 operation and the drive is backward compatible and will run at the lower standard if that is all that is available. As to running, I have a Maxtor drive that is so quiet you have to have your ear pressed against it to hear it run. Are you sure the data cable connector is not turned over?

Cheers Chris I downloaded MaxBlast and everthing is now OK. Thanks for the info. As a point of interest Maxblast Fdisked and Formatted 3 partitions on the drive in about 5 seconds. How does it do it so quickly.

What did you run the Easy Bios Program to fix the problem?

I have a Intel chipset kobian i440zx motherboard with pentium II 350 MHz. It is noet detecting the new 40GB Seagate Harddisk(ATA 100 5400 RPM). It is not detecting the the harddisk in either IDE. It just hangs. Chris has said the there is a need for an overlay program for maxtor hard disk. What about seagate. Where can I get it. Please help me. Thanks in advance.

I have the same problem. I buyed a maxtor 40gb hd, i downloaded the max blast II program, run it, made some partitions, and the programs asked me to reboot my system. I did that and the pc tried to detect my hd, and i get hanged. What is the problem?