Harddrive not recognized!

[hoc7hoi9]

I know the subect is so familiar in this forum but please bear me out.

I took out the harddrive (4OGB Maxtor) from the old machine to temporarily install in the new PC so I could copy files to the new HD. Now I put it back in the old PC, but when I boot the BIOS does not recognize the HD. Bios recognizes the two CD-R's as primary master and slave, but first it says: "detect the secondary master -none". Afterwards the Ultra100 detects: D0 Maxtor ...LBA...UDMA 5; D1, D2 and D3 not detected.

I uses the Windows XP CD to boot, system would recognizes drive C:\windows and 4 other logical drives on the HD. I also runs the Easy Recovery from CD, it recognizes the 5 partitions C, D, E, F and G but on the 'unknown drive type 37.28GB'.

How could I get system to recognize the drive? I really do not want to lose info on that drive. The drive was formatted as FAT32 with WinXP as main OS. Award Bios updated for MB Asus A7V. And every thing used to work fine before.

Thanks for your advice.

 

[wolluf]

Is drive jumpered correctly (eg, did you make it a slave in other machine, haven't put it back as master)?

PS. Do you mean to have your CD-Rs on PRIMARY IDE - so hard drive must be on SECONDARY?

 

[hoc7hoi9]

Thanks wolluf!

I've tried connecting only the HD to the primary IDE but when booting up the system does not recognize the drive as described. I guess the reason it says CD-Rs as Primary Master and Slave because it recognizes only that IDE. Actually, this Asus has 4 IDE connectors, the CD-Rs are connected to the Primary IDE, the HD to the Primary Ultra 100 IDE connector.

I used a XP bootdisk (floppy) and could get to teh logon screen, but the mouse did not work so could not explore further. I also use the repair console from the CD to fixboot. It says fixboot successful but, still, the system could not boot from HD because HD was not recognized.

The issue, in my opinion, is how to get the HD recognized in the booting process. But that's just an opinion. Please advise.

 

[wolluf]

Just a thought - you are using the right sort of IDE connector (ie, 80 pin for the Hard drive)? If its Ultra 100 IDE connector, it will presumably need that.

 

[wolluf]

PS - another thought - what about the booting sequence in the bios (ie, the 100 IDE connector is ON it?)

 

[hoc7hoi9]

Thanks wolluf. I did use the 80-conductor (blue cable) for the ATA100 primary connection. This connection had worked before. The boot sequence was CD-R, IDE, floppy. However, after the computer ran through its post, BIOS would recognize CD-R's as primary master and slave since they were connected to the primary IDE. It did not recognize any harddrive. Then the Ultra100 kicked in and recognized the harddrive which was connected to the primary UltraDMA100.

I checked the ADM forum and learned the process as stated above. But in my case, after the UltraDMA is recognized the system could not boot up. I used some utilities to check and found out that somehow the FAT on the HD did not match. Using FDISk from a boot floppy it indicated that primary partition was not set up as active partition. Fixed that; reboot, system informed NTLDR missing. Used XP CD to copy NTLDR back to C:, but somehow system kept saying NTLDR missing! Used fixboot but 'NTLDR' was not found. Eventually, I decided to reinstall XP by formatting just the C: parttition (only XP and programs were installed on this partition, so data files were not affected.)

Currently after the post sequence, BIOS still not recognizes HD, only the Ultra DMA 100 verifies the HD and boot XP from there. If I connect the HD to the primary IDE then BIOS would recognize HD from the post, but this would deprive the HD its speed. I still cannot figure out how to set the Ultra DMA boot first. The motherboard (ASUS A7V) is no longer supported by the manuf. But, at least, the system is running.

Once more, thank you for responding to my problem.