Hard drive say's missing OS and I cant install any OS.

[comptek]

Hello
I have an HP Pavilion 9680c with a maxtor 40 gig drive with Win 98se. Recently the computer started to slow down was giving various fatal blue screen errors. I tried to do a recover using the cd's that came with the pc but when i do I get a message that say's 'recovery aborted cannot find Hard drive? Check your cables etc. Use fdisk to format drive.' When I do that I get a 'No fixed disk present'. I can put the HD on another computer as a slave and was able to browse to it. When I put it back on the problem pc I still get the same result nothing. I tried putting it on the secondary IDE and put the cd writer and dvd player on the primary and the bios saw the HD on the secondary IDE as a master and the cd and dvd on the primary IDE master/slave no problem. I tried to do the recovery this way and it still did not see the drive. I tried to load win 98 and forced it to boot to the cd but I get a missing OS. All devices in the bios are set to detect auto, so not sure what is the problem. If it is the motherboard why would it see the HD on the secondary IDE/controller and not on the primary even though the primary see's my dvd and cd writer devices? Can someone help? The mother board is an asus P2B-VT.

Thanks

Comptek
A+, Network+

 

[edfair]

Time for diagnostics from the drive manufacturer.

And be prepared to replace the drive.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[ski]

The HD may be ok if you're able to browse it on another system.
Reconnect it to the other system, and see if you can open files, and copy files to and from it.

If that's ok, then connect just the HD as Master(or CS) to IDE 1 on the problem system, disconnect all other drives, go into BIOS and make sure the HD is recognized and the floppy drive is configured as a boot device ahead of the HD, insert a Win 98 boot floppy, restart, select 'Start without CD-ROM support', press Enter, at the A:\> prompt type dir c: and press Enter.
If the contents of the HD do not show up and instead it says something like 'Invalid drive parameter', then repeat the same procedure with the HD connected to IDE 2.
If no luck, then try a different known working IDE cable.
If still no good, then connect a different power lead to the drive.
If nothing works, then the HD is probably bad.

 

[comptek]

Thanks Ed,

I will try that. I just got another HD and slapped it in and it did the samething. The 2nd HD came from a working pc. Unless the HD got messed up from the transfer home (ie static) =(. Not sure though. I will look into the manufacturer though.

Comptek
A+, Network+

 

[edfair]

Now that a second drive has the same failure you can discount the bad drive advice to a point.
The CMOS, processor, memory, controller, cables, and drive all have to work together to get the drive operative.
Time to get into the BIOS and see what it can identify as the drive. Normally a setting in CMOS that can be forced or a choice that will self identify. If it won't identify, then cable or IDE controller.
And a bad battery that loses CMOS drive identification will cause this.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.