Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Hardrive not detected?

Status
Not open for further replies.

kcitt

Technical User
Dec 18, 2002
13
US
Can anyone help?
I was build my own computer comple month ago and it work just find until. I tried to changed new hardrive and then I recieved that message that said hardrive not detected. I tried to puted my own one that had been work before in, but it still do the same thing. My CPU is AMD XP 2100, MB PC Chips, 512MB SDRAM, WXP Pro. I tried all chaged MB, Jumper setting. I have four hardrives that do the same. Do you think this is hardrive problem or Motherboad? Please help me out with this problem. The hardrive two are new and two old. Thank you in advance.

KC
 
Sounds like you may have partially disconnected the ribbon at the motherboard. Or have wiggled the cable in such a way that a connection opened.
Try another cable and make sure it is seated at M/B end.

Ed Fair
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.
 
I would remove all cables and power cords to the HDD's except for the one that you have your operating system on. Make sure that the jumper is set as master, make sure that the HDD cable is on correctly(red stripe and pin 1 on IDE port and HDD.)and that the power cord is plugged in correctly and is seated completely. Then power up and go into your bios settings checking that hard drive detection is set to auto and see if this drive is recognized if it is then continue with boot and see if your operating system is read by the hard drive. If it boots up without any errors then check the next drive on the same IDE port is set to slave. Go through this procedure until you get the same error as before then you know that you found the culprit or else they should all work.

Get a IDE cable that you know is good. If this is a motherboard problem then it should give an error such as dma error and not just hard drive not detected.

Also another option you can try is to write down the number of cylinders,heads and sectors of each drive and enter this information in your bios settings using the user option if auto doesn't work.

You may need a bigger power supply you should have no smaller than a 350 watt for this setup.

I tried to cover all bases please let me know how it works.
 
Thank you for all advice. I tried them all, but still not working any other advice?

KC
 
Going back to what WPFAFF said, start with the simplest setup possible. One HDD (leave all others unplugged), have a couple of cables so you can swap them. Set the HDD to master, make sure that it's plugged into your primary IDE channel and not the secondary.

Also, if the IDE cable is an 80-wire cable instead of a 40-wire cable, make sure you're using the correct connectors. They should be colour-coded - I think it's blue to the motherboard, black to the master drive, grey to the secondary drive?
 
You haven't flipped the ribbon cable to the wrong way have you?
When the system powers on you should be able to feel and hear the hard drive spin up, followed by a couple of sounds like bzzzzt. If the drive isn't spinning up you have a power or motor problem.

Do you have access to the BIOS and CMOS? Does CMOS allow you to auto identify? If so and you run it, you should see the drive there.
And you may want to look in the CMOS settings to make sure that the HD controller is enabled. And both channels.

Ed Fair
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.
 
Test the IDE channels with another cable and a cd-rom drive if it works it's the HD if not then the mobo or other
 
This may sound off the wall but try unplugging your floppy drive (had a HD not power up because of reversed connection at floppy drive)and as everyone else has said start with -does HD even have power? Are any pins folded over at connections, are jumper settings correct on HD, double check over and over again. Even when you've done this a million times you can miss something really simple. It's been my experience that if the PC is going to recognize the HD it'll do it rather quickly. Check all settings in Bios one at a time you may stumble on something you've missed. Get one HD running and add slave and secondary master/slave one at a time. Have patience you'll feel stupid if you break something and later find it was something really simple.
 
reversed cables are a killer I do that to floppy drives no matter how many times I check for pin-1
 
In XP, Disk Management, an Action, Rescan disks can often do wonders.
 
Thank you for all helping. I tried them all, but still not working. I think its the hardrive itself that not working. I will return it to a manufacture and thank you again.

KC
 
If you've tried all the other advice then that may be your best bet. Personally I'd try it all over again, just to be sure.

If you think about it the hard drives are just about the only mechanial thing's left in PCs. The last two PCs I've repaired have both been HD failures.

Ray
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top