BIOS will not reconize hard drive

[lanwan]

I am upgrading an old machines hard drive to a WD400 40GB 7200RPM hard drive from a Seagate ST34342A 4.3GB 4500RPM hard drive. The problem is my bios does not detect the new WD400 hard drive. I have verified that the jumper is correctly configured with the hard drive manual. Which is set as a master on the Primary IDE controller. At boot up the system halts at "AUTO DETECTION...PRI MASTER". If I go into the CMOS and do an auto detection of PRI MASTER the CMOS seems to freeze. When I put the old hard drive on the controller the bios has no problem with dection and boots with no issues. What is the problem?

~Ryan

 

[SESaskDFC]

Howdy:

The BIOS on the old system can't handle the size of the new hdd.. You should use the utility disk that came with the hdd to partition and format as that should bypass the limitation.. or, you could search for an updated BIOS for the motherboard.

Murray

 

[denodave]

Agreed. If you don't want to risk flashing the bios chip then partition the drive into 32GB or less chunks. The other thing is what type of hardware is acting as the slave on that cable?

Western digital drives have a funny reaction when you jumper them as masters if you don't have a WD drive as slave. Try the the cable select jumper instead (on both units if there is a second drive), or at least make sure the slave unit is in fact set as a slave.

Email me! dsaunders114@yahoo.com
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