Bios not detecting hard drive after reformat.

[SQLwannabe]

I was getting all kinds of weird Windows errors so I decided to just wipe the thing clean and start over. It was my children's computer and they had put junk on top of junk and I thought it best to just start from scratch.

I ran Fdisk and erased the current partition and then set a new one and made sure it was active. I rebooted and then formatted the drive.

I then booted my computer with my Win ME bootdisk and I noticed that it loaded the drivers into Virtual Drive D: instead of C: I thought something was wrong, but I proceeded to run setup from my CD Rom drive to install Win ME. It got somewhat through the process of copying the files and then would crap out and say it couldn't copy certain files. After rebooting a few times and a few more unsuccessful attempts at installing windows it finally dawned on me that I needed to look further into what the problem might be.

I rebooted and went into my bios and noticed that my hard drive was not being detected. It is set on Auto-Detect (or at least it appears to be) so that eliminated the most common cause of the problem.

My hard drive is an IBM Deskstar 30 GB running on an Asus A7V motherboard with the latest bios with an AMD 1200 CPU. I downloaded an utility from IBM to test the hard drive and it found the drive and all tests were successful. This means the hard drive is fine as far as I can tell. I wasn't seeing any bad sectors when doing routine maintenance with Scandisk before all of this.

Someting I'm noticing is that on booting it seems to set up the Primary/Slave settings and then looks for a hard drive. After I see the terms Primary Master etc. I see at the top what looks like a message from Promise Technology which is the ATA controller saying something about the Bus Master being enabled and then I see the word "Detecting" below and then it does show my hard Drive below this. But as I've said in the bios it doesn't show up and if I look at the boot sequence and cursor down to IDE hard drive it says "None".

When I run the IBM utility which is bootable it will give me the drives that it detects and it shows the following:

00 Primary Master Plextor CD Rom Drive
01 Secondary Master Creative CD Rom Drive
02 PC IDE 0 Master My IBM Hard drive

As far as the physical setup I'm sure it's fine since it has worked with no problems for several months. By physical set up I mean cables, jumpers, etc.

This is a regular Ata controller and not Raid. I only Ran Fdisk after repeatedly running into this problem and thinking that maybe it might help.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Walter

 

[Guest_imported]

Partition the drive again, make certain you delete the old partiton and repartition it properly, only this time dont format it. Load your OS and let your OS tell you that the drive is not formatted and ask if youd like to format it. Then format it. I had a big problem similar to this installing XP, after about 4 hours this did the trick.

 

[Pyramus]

Can't be bothered to read through all that, but using a dynamic drive overlay may help "hard drive not detected" issues.

 

[robofactory]

Hi...

I know you touched on it already, but I've seen some WEIRD problems from IDE cables - if you're still foundering, replace the ribbon cable, and check out the pwr supply cable, too (another source of funky symptoms)...

John

http://robofactory.mybravenet.com/

"A Mind Is A Terrible Thing..."

 

[ceh4702]

Use the FDISK.EXE to look at the hard drive. If it is there FDISK will see it. If FDISK can read the hard drive it is probably all right. Sometimes partitions are hard to remove and you have to play with it a little bit. Ive seen cases where you only get part of the drive with a logical drive letter and most of the drive isnt even visible because it has some odd partition and it doesnt format. i.e. a 20 gig hard drive with a 500MB partition/drive.

If your memory is bad, then it will cause all kinds of random problems look at the boot sequence and see if it reads all of the memory every single time. You may have bad memory and the memory check turned off in the BIOS.

Sometimes on an install you need to use himem.sys to be able to run scandisk or you run out of memory. You sometimes need to format the hard drive also and see what size it is. format c:/u/s is the unconditional format that installs the system on the harddrive. You can also use format c: and put the system files on later with the SYS A: C: command. The unconditional format rewrites the the fat table and formats the drive, whithout checking to see if any data is there or not. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[chaps]

00 Primary Master Plextor CD Rom Drive
01 Secondary Master Creative CD Rom Drive
02 PC IDE 0 Master My IBM Hard drive

Normally your hard drive needs to be set up on IDE 00 when you do a new clean install using the Microsoft boot disk. Your first IDE is considered to be C:\ drive. We suggest that you connect your hard drive to IDE 1 and then connect the ROM drives up to IDE 2.

Mike