Have major headache: Have ancient

[018331751]

Have major headache:
Have ancient Gateway 2000 P575 PC, the Hard drive broke so I replaced it with a 40 Gigabyte one, but now the whole system won't recognise my floppy or CD drive or the new hard drive.
Realise I need to do a Flash bios Upgrade but it wont read anything : says "Please insert bootable media", recoginses devices Floppy and CD ROM but won't read them if you know what i mean! Jumpered Correct to the best of my knowledge, have set boot sequence Floppy, CD, hard drive, still same message. Any Ideas?

 

[aldog]

It may be that the hard drive is too large for the bios to regognize. If the computer is that old, the bios will most likely be limited to the size of the hard drive that it can handle.

I am dealing with the same issue right now, of getting a bigger hard drive to work in the old Packard Bell.

I would most that the hard drive is simply too big. If the screen freezes at the bios setup, then I would do the following:

Check to make sure the jumpers are correct and that all the cables are securely connected. And I am supposing that the bios is setup to boot from the hard drive first, then the floppy, then the cd-rom?

What is happening is that the computer is searching for a bootable hard drive first, but since the drive is too big, the bios cannot read it and it hangs.

You can try many things for it to work. How old is this computer? What operating system are you using? If the computer is before 1995, you will most likely not be able to use the full capacity above 8.4 Gb, which would be the called the "cylinder limitation" and what you may want to do is to put a jumper over the "cylinder/size limitation position" to make the hard drive 'appear' to be only 8.4 gb so that the bios can properly handle it.

Your post is a little confusing....does the floppy, cd-rom, and/or hard drive appear in the bios at bootup? In this case you could go into the bios and manually enter the size of the hard drive to force the bios to see the hard drive. If you enter the bios setup, you will see an option to configure the IDE devices manually. Select the channel (either primary of master) and slave or master that your hard drive is connected to, and choose to manually enter the CYLINDERS, HEADS, AND SECTORS of the hard drive. Don't worry, this will NOT affect the drive itself, but is just a setting in the bios to tell it the size of the drive incase it cannot see it.

If you cannot enter the bios setup, then you will have to disconnect the drive, enter the bios setup, manually enter the CYLINDERS, HEADS, and SECTORS, and then plug the hard drive back in and reboot. If that does not work, then you may have to install software such as MaxBlast3 (if the drive is Maxtor) to help you use the hard drive.

Here is a helpfull site to explain this further:

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/...arch_type=3&p_cat_lvl1=~any~&p_cat_lvl2=~any~

copy and paste this...it refers to Maxtor hard drives but the information can be applied to almost all hard drives.

http://howto.lycos.com/lycos/step/1,,139+24365+10039,00.html