Computer posts then nothing...

[garwain]

I'm trying to recycle parts from an old Pentium 166 into a newer PII 450, but when I transfered the HDD (upgrading from a nice little 1.6 to a 4Gig...) I get the machine to post detecting the hard drive, but then it'll just hang with a blank screen. I've been trough the bios and have tried changing the HDD type using all options (AUTO, NORMAL, LBA, LARGE) and have also turned UDMA on and off as well as trying the MODE 0 instead of auto.

The "new" drive works fine in the old P166. It's a FUJITSU MCP304AT -E drive.

The computer is running an AWARD bios.

The funny thing is, that if I remember correctaly, this 4Gig drive was the original drive in the machine I'm trying to put it in.

Any ideas on why my machine just hangs at a black screen immediatly after post would be appreciated.

Thanks.
Ben

 

[edfair]

I've had it several times where a low level and reinstall helped. Nevr bothered to trace the root cause. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.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.

 

[garwain]

I have no problem with doing the low-level format however this bloody machine freezes solid before getting to the point where it will boot from the floopy drive (yes the floppy is the first device in the boot sequence and it's a good boot disk)

The problem is definitly with the drive because other drives work fine, and it's only when I have this HDD on an IDE cable that the computer freezes. The same HDD works fine in other computers.

Any ideas as the where to look now?

Thanks again

 

[edfair]

Ususally the freeze is a timed try to ID the drive. Let it time out and see what happens. Might be 5 minutes or so.
Or how about deleting all references to the drive in CMOS but leave it plugged in and see if you can get to floppy boot and fdisk. May not work , but I've seen 1 or 2 that did.
Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.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.

 

[garwain]

OK. I got it now.

The computer would not recover from the freeze (walked away for half an hour one time...)

I ended up upgrading my bios (doesn't make sense because this drive was the original drive on the computer and I'd bought a new drive for it a year ago. now switching the drive back causes problems?!?

Oh well I guess it's all part of the life of a technician...

Thanks anyway

 

[garwain]

Seems I spoke too soon. Now I've tried doing a low level format on the drive, no such luck The diagnostic utility from fujitsu reports an error, same with low-level format utility. FDISK says "error reading fixed disk" and Win2K give "failed to arcread boot partition" errors.

Any ideas would be appreciated
My mother will be happy to have a new computer if I can get this running (actually if this takes much longer I'll break down and buy myself a new HDD. Just didn't have it in the budget building my new computer.)

 

[edfair]

How about trying a longer cable or a shorter cable. I've had issues and have heard of others having issues with cable lengths where going to a different length resolved them.
Understand, this is now grabbing at straws. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.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.

 

[tlcscousin]

Kind of a foolish question but is the drive jumpered correctly? I assume it was master in the older machine is it going in as master in that one as well and something else is set as master on the same cable?

 

[garwain]

ed:
I've tried several cables. This machine that I'm working on had not been used for some time so I figured one of the cables might be the problem.

futuretech:
the jumpers are fine. This drive was previously a master and also the bios detects it fine now. I still get the errors though.

It's not just win2K. I've tried 95, 98 and ME as well without success.

I had this problem with one other machine when it was looking for an ATA100 drive, but I've seen nothing regarding ATA in the bios.

 

[jakesnake]

Try another HD as master and put this one as slave. If its runs to the c:\ then fdisk and format the slave drive. This should clear up the problem.
Reinstall it as the master (change jumper pins) and it should work
Good luck
Shawn

 

[garwain]

I have tried using a different drive as the master but when i try to modify the slave drive I still get errors trying to do FDISK, FORMAT or even a lowlevel format.

I think I'm just going to go out and buy a new drive... I've wasted too much time with little progres.