Second hard drive not recognized

lasalle · Jul 13, 2000

I am simply trying to get a Fujitsu 4.3 GB hard drive recognized by my Award BIOS (level is: 4.50 PG). I have been using a Western Digital 2.5 GB drive as my C: drive for months. I simply want to get a second drive recognized as D:  The Western Digital jumper is set to master and has been since day one. The Fujitsu jumper is set to slave. I am on the primary controller with both drives. The Fujitsu CHS parameters were taken right from the drive case and entered into the BIOS. In the BIOS, I can change the Mode for the Fujitsu to LBA mode and while the CHS parameters change, the reported size of the hard drive remains correct. In any event, when I boot, the machine simply hangs. It hangs just after the Award BIOS copyright message appears, followed by another message 30 seconds later that there is a "hard disk failure (80)" It sure appears that adding this second drive disables the first and second drives from being recognized. I have rechecked the jumper settings for these drives. I have connected an older IDE 250 MB drive as a second drive and after changing the BIOS to reflect the settings on that drive, the machine boots fine. So, it would appear this BIOS has trouble recognizing 2 drives at once that are each over 2 GB in size, but why?  Is is just a matter of flashing this BIOS to a later version to correct this? In summary, adding a second drive that is larger than 2 GB to this BIOS prevents the machine from booting. Just for the record, the same thing happens when I try to use the Secondary IDE controller with the Fujitsu set as a master OR slave drive. It still hangs. This is a clone, not a Dell, Gateway, IBM, or similar so the motherboard is obscure TIA for your responses.

LadyH · Jul 14, 2000

Checking the BIOS would be a good start..does the system recognize the Fujitsu drive on its own?? Some systems cannot see hard drives over a particular size, should check on that as well as far as your system is concerned..since you say the motherboard is obscure, it may be hard to find info on it, but i'd look to see (if you can find something) if there are restrictions to the motherboard as well...if its been a while since you've flashed the bios, I would be careful jumping from an old one to a very new one, might want to update in incriments if this is the case, save yourself some headaches... <a href=mailto: pcheather@home.net> pcheather@home.net</a> <a href= > </a>

fenris · Jul 14, 2000

Did you try putting the drive on the secondary ide channel? Does the bios autodetect the drive(s)? Check the connector cable, maybe swap it with the cd-rom and see what happens. fenris <a href=mailto:fenris@hotmail.com>fenris@hotmail.com</a> <a href= > </a>

clivo · Jul 15, 2000

Hi the laselle BIOS that does not recognise >2GB does not cause the computer to hang. A hang at boot stage is a hardware failure. The first thing to do is to determine whether the Fujitsu is okay or not. various ways you can do this; try it in a different machine or simply disconnect the WD drive, connect the Fujitsu and just check whether it boots or not. If it does, you may as well partition and format the thing before trying them both again. Obviously if the machine wont boot with only the Fujitsu installed then it has a problem. By the way, what about ATA? 33 or 66? Clive <a href=mailto:clive@digitalsky.co.za>clive@digitalsky.co.za</a> <a href= > </a> I assemble and sell these things.

edfair · Jul 15, 2000

early drives had a slave present jumper to activate control of the slave. may not apply. Will it recognize the Fugi by itself in either channel? Acts more like a defective Fugi than anything else. Ed Fair <a href=mailto: efair@atlnet.com> efair@atlnet.com</a> <a href= > </a> 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.

ATCal · Jul 16, 2000

Why are you manually entering the parameters? If this board can recognize your 2.5 WD, it must have auto detection. If the board cannot autodetect your Fuji, then don't even bother entering the params. manually. There is obviuosly another problem somewhere. As asked previously, does the machine detect the Fuji alone? I did by the way encounter early Pentium 100 era gateways that would not support more than 1 LBA drive per controller. The difference here howver is that it would detect as 504 and was usable. The error 80 would to me represent a master/slave hardware problem. Just for kicks, try a different jumper on the Fuji. They can be bad and will cause you to pull your hair out finding the problem. Best of luck. Al <a href=mailto: atc-computing@home.com> atc-computing@home.com</a> <a href= > </a>

lasalle · Jul 17, 2000

Hello all- Thank you all for a very prompt and wide ranging series of responses. As is sometimes the case with these situations, you look at your options and make the decision that seems most prudent. It was obvious that I was not going to get this Fujitsu drive recognized as a second drive under any circumstances on this PC. Just for the record, on another clone I have, I simply connected it as the master, got it autodetected, ran fdisk, formatted it with DOS 6.22 and was ready to put Windows95 or Windows98 on it. At that point, I put it back in the original PC that was not recognizing it and it still was not being seen by the BIOS. Now, I know that no matter what I was able to do with it on another PC, until and unless the BIOS on my problem PC recognized this drive, it just wasn't going to be seen to where I could use it as a 2nd drive. So, I simply bit the bullet and dropped the Master drive from my problematic PC into yet another PC, created a Ghost image of that Master on the D: partition of the hard drive in that PC, removed the Master, replaced it with the Fujitsu, cloned the Master onto the Fujitsu, installed the Fujitsu into the problematic PC as a Master, got it recognized immediately as the Master in that PC and called it done. Total elapsed time: 14 minutes, including all time waiting for Ghost images to be created and laid back down. I am sorry I did not indicate that my original goal was to replace the original Master with the Fujitsu but it doesn't matter since I still should have been able to get the Fujitsu recognized as a 2nd drive. And, I may have needed to have the Fujitsu as a 2nd drive for some reason and in this case, it just wasn't going to happen. It was frustrating yet at the same time, educational. I appreciate all the responses and again, Ghost shows its merit as a disk clone tool. I could have used Partition Magic or Drive Image but remember, I just could not get the disk recognized as a 2nd disk at all so those tools would still have had to be run on the spare PC that I ended up using. Thanks to all and lets get on the better things.

fenris · Jul 17, 2000

I know it is a little late, but you could have tried putting the fugi as master and the other drive as slave, then boot with a floppy and run ghost from there. That may have worked.... fenris <a href=mailto:fenris@hotmail.com>fenris@hotmail.com</a> <a href= > </a>

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Second hard drive not recognized

lasalle

IS-IT--Management

LadyH

Technical User

fenris

Programmer

clivo

Vendor

edfair

Technical User

ATCal

MIS

lasalle

IS-IT--Management

fenris

Programmer

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