Can't Find Hard Drive

[chrisp909]

I have a 200mmx machine with 64 meg ram that won't recognize the hard drive.

It finds the CDROM no prob but when I go in to the bios it finds nothing automatically there is a single user defined setting that seems correct but when used yields a no system disk error.

It has an older Phoenix Bios I haven't tried looking up and flashing because everything is original that really shouldn't be an issue.

Cable is not the issue either. Any suggestions would be great I know details are vague, sorry. I currently have limited access to the machine.

Anyone who has experienced and solved similar please reply.
Thanks.

 

[chrisp909]

Postscript to above:
I have tried another hard drive that I know works. The problem is not the hard drive either.

 

[tlcscousin]

How many IDE devices do you have in the pc?
Try hooking the HDD to the secondary cable and put the cd-rom on the primary and see if the hdd is then seen.If so and the hdd is ok but the cd isnt.
Then it would be either bad cable or bad controller on the mb.
If they are then both seen this could just be a cable either on its way out or not making good contact.

 

[chrisp909]

cable is not the issue, that's the first thing checked. I did put the CDROM on the primary and the HD on the secondary cd showed up HD did not.

I agree it sounds like a controller problem. Is there any way to confirm this?

 

[edfair]

Something with the hard drive on both channels. Something that is unique to this machine.
Built in IDE or expansion card? Did fdisk tell you no drives present or allow partition?
I've run across it several times. Some drives just won't work on certain m/bs at certain speeds. But I've always been able to see them in bios. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[chrisp909]

IDE is on board. I was able to get fdisk working, I had forgotten about that. That really doesn't make much sence does it? How can I run Fdisk if the bios isn't even picking up the drive?

I will take your advice and try an older slower disk on the machine. It really shouldn't matter since I am pretty sure the disk I am using is OEM but it is a good suggestion and worth a shot.

 

[chrisp909]

F-Disk did work. The bios was set to a user setting and would not auto-recognize new disks until the defualt settings were reset.

DUH!

F9, pretty major.

Thanks for the help.