New Hard Drive: S.M.A.R.T error on boot up

[wildek]

I have an HP 854n PC. It currently has a 120 GB 5400 RPM hard drive in it. I just purchased a Seagate 300 GB 7200 RPM to use as the slave.

I was not able to get the PC to detect the new drive with the exisiting cable. I tried setting the jumpers to slave, and then to ignore drive size on the new hard drive but it wouldn't detect it in the BIOS or in Windows.

I then tried the cable that came with the new drive and plugged the master connection to the old drive, and the slave part to the new drive. When I boot up, I get this error:
Primary Master Hard Disk S.M.A.R.T Status Bad.
Warning: Backup data...
Primary Slave Hard Disk S.M.A.R.T Status Bad.
Warning: Backup data...

Is this a false error since it is saying both are bad? I did try hitting F2 to continue, and it said boot disk failure. I unplugged the cable from the new drive (slave) and Win XP booted up with no errors.

Any advice on what I could try next?

Thanks!

 

[wildek]

Also, the jumper on the new drive is set to Cable Select. I'm not sure what the jumper is set to on the Master (original) drive. Could this be the problem.

 

[Freestone]

If using Cable Select, then both drives must be set as such, and the Master drive will then be the drive at the end of the cable, furthest from the motherboard connector, with the Slave drive being the drive on the middle connector.

When using Master/Slave jumpering, you should still try placing the drives on the connectors as stated above, though the Master/Slave roles would ultimately be determined by the jumpers (one drive set as Master, the other as Slave).

 

[stduc]

New drives can be bad - but not often.

How about testing it in another PC to see if you get the same problem.

You could try running Spinrite on the drive to see if it gave you any further details.