Dell BIOS Won't recognize new drive

[musiktek]

I am trying to reinstall Windows on a new hard drive. Windows used to be installed on a different drive, but after having lots of problems reinstalling to that drive, I wiped another drive I had, and am trying that one. I have a 3 yr old Dell and the BIOS won't recognize the drive. It originally was a secondary drive under the old setup and it was recognized fine. The Master/Slave pin is in the right spot for Master. for some reason, it let me go through the whole process of installing windows, and restarted the computer, but the BIOS won't recognize the drive to startup from it. The Windows cd recognized the drive to wipe it and install windows, why won't my BIOS recognize it?

thanks for any help! I use my computer as a digital audio workstation, so any questions anyone has in that field, ask away

 

[stduc]

Did you reformat the drive with a bootable partition and install windows on that?

Are you saying that the BIOS does not even 'see' the drive? Or sees it but as non bootable.

Perhaps you could post some more details?

 

[wolluf]

Something odd here. The bios OBVIOUSLY recognised the drive if you installed windows on it. So can you tell us exactly what happens after the install completed when you boot the machine?

eg, is the drive appearing on the POST screen - presumably it did during the install?

what error messages do you get?

is it the only drive in the machine currently?

if its XP you installed, what happened during the install process? If you boot from XP CD again & choose repair, soes it find an installation to repair?

 

[musiktek]

I'm not sure how Windows would see the drive, but not the BIOS. In the BIOS the drive came up as unknown, and an error message in another screen saying their were no drives installed. After playing around with those annoying jumper pins, I realized, the master in my system didn't even need a jumper. But how Windows wrote to my disk without the Bios recognizing it, I don't know. Regardless, I got the system up and running, and it's working wonderfully. I really appreciate the help. This is definitely the best forum I've been to. This is definitely getting a bookmark.

 

[cdogg]

musiktek,

Glad you got it solved.

I just want to mention that any IDE device that is set as Master should be connected to the "end" connector of the IDE cable. Slaves should be fitted to the "middle" connector. Perhaps you have the position reversed, which would explain why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

Also in the future when you have problems like that, it's best to make the hard drive the only device on the IDE channel as a test until you get it working.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
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