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another western digital 80GB caviar issue

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jon61484

Technical User
Feb 20, 2007
1
US
I have two computers at my use. One is a P4 3Ghz, 1GB 800mhz DDR, and windows XP. It has a serial ATA hard drive.

My other computer is a Gigabyte dual slot 1 motherboard running two 500mhz pentium 3 processors. My operating system on this machine is linux.

Alright. So I've had three different motherboards in this computer, and only one of them saw this WD800. It was an older 300mhz Pentium II motherboard. The two newer ones (still 8 to 9 years old, lol) won't detect this hard drive, whereas the newest computer (the p4) detects it just fine. Going through either the bootup processes right after the memory check where it auto detects hard drives, or in the bios screen trying to detect them, it pauses for a long time and then says there is nothing to detect for that slot. (primary, slave, IDE1 or IDE2)

I've tried everything I can think of, minus taking it back into this computer, reformatting it (again) and seeing if there isn't something wrong with the MBR. Idk. It was last reformatted for linux on the P2 300mhz computer and installed linux. there's no reason why this thing less than a year old should be having these issues.

in any case, I've tried it on cable select, master, slave, and it won't be found on either of the two types of motherboards. (the pentium 3 600mhz or the dual p3) anybody think they might know why?
 
jon61484,

I know this is not what you want to hear but unless you have valuable data on that drive I would sh**-can it and spend the $40 to replace it. Your time is worth that, isn't it?

If you do have valuable data on it then get a new drive of equal or greater capacity and connect it along with the Caviar (as slave) to the MB w/ the BIOS thats sees it and image it.

Old hardware reaches a point of diminishing returns both in time & frustration factor.

Tony

 
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