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Harddrive Recognized / Not Recognized... 1

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gaygaruda

Technical User
Jun 8, 2006
2
US
I'm trying to fix a hard drive problem my father was having, which he says was basically a "No Hard Disk found" kind of problem in boot-up. When I put his Master drive (WesternDigital Cavier EIDE 80.0GB) into my machine (Intel 2.0Ghz W2000, etc.) as a slave, it's recognized no problem and it tests fine with WD's diagnostic software. However, when I replace it in his machine (which has the same motherboard and Intel processor) it intermittantly recognizes the S/N of the hard drive in the BIOS setup, or sometimes it doesn't even do that, but when it actually tries to boot it hangs for a few seconds (after recognizing two CD-ROMs on the other cable) before saying no hard disk was found. It seems like I've had this problem before, and the fix was so simple I forgot what it was. Do I need to have a more up-to-date patch cable (80-pin, not 40-pin?) for this drive to work properly? Am I missing something? My next step would be to swap out the patch cable on my other machine to see if that would make a difference. But I'm at a loss. I've tried the obvious stuff, and need your help. Thank you.
 
should certainly be using 80 pin ide cable. trying a different ide cable would be one of my first actions.

did you use different cable when connecting to your machine?

have you tried connecting it to secondary controller (where optical drives are) on his machine - might be a problem with primary controller.

How is it jumpered (if master try cable select and vice versa. If it has master with or without slave present settings, make sure you're using right one)?
 
Wolluf,

Thank you for your suggestions. I tried everything you suggested to no avail, and as a last straw I switched the HD jumper from Master or Slave to Cable Select. Amazingly, it is now being recognized and all seems well. I don't know why this fixes it, but everything seems to be running fine (or at least as fine as to be expected as my parents have an innate ability, it seems, to really screw up their computer ever six months or so). I ultimately had to reformat, but at least it's running now and a good reformat isn't so bad sometimes. Thank you again.

mothy
 
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