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

System doesn't detect hard drive?? 2

Status
Not open for further replies.

mikeyaz

Technical User
Jan 15, 2003
7
0
0
US
I have a Toshiba Laptop (Satellite 2805) for which I just purchased a new 12 gig Toshiba hdd. I installed the hard drive, physically but when I went to format the drive the system told me that no drive was present. I thought that the problem might be linked to the computer itself, so I purchased a hdd converter and tried to load thr drive on my desktop, however my desktop did not recognize the hdd as well. Both systems told me that the hdd was malfunctioning, not present, or in need of drivers???? Is there something that I can do to solve this problem? Am I doing something wrong? Has anyone else experienced a similar problem? Much thanks for any help.
 
Questions: Does your computer recognize it in the intial boot up? What OS do you have? Did you replace your hard drive or add this one? Answers: Lots of times, new hard drives are not formatted at all, so Windows won't even say it exists. If this is the case, which i think it is, create a boot disk that has fdisk on it. (Try: Restart your computer with your new boot disk in and -ONLY- your new hardrive plugged in. When it finishes booting type: "a:\>fdisk" (without a:\> or ""). When this brings up a screen, see if you have any existing partitions. If so, delete them and create new ones (one will be somewhere around 7 mb). If not, create new ones. Exit Fdisk and restart with boot disk still in. When booted, type: "a:\>format c:" (without a:\> or ""). When that finishes, turn off your computer and remove your bootdisk. Connect your old Hard drive(assuming you're using 2, if not, see P.S. below). You should be able to see your new hard drive now when you turn on your computer.

P.S. When in DOS the second time, put your OS cd in and install it to your new hard drive.

Hope this works for you.

-Growing Haze
 
Hi
I am not sure if GrowingHaze suggestion has solved your problem .I too have the same problem.

GrowingHaze according to what mikeyaz has mentioned i feel his bios itself is not recogonizing the HDD.

I too have the same problem in fact i had to replace my old HDD I got a new one of the same size HDD .it is not recogonizing the HDD i get a error IDE #0 Error.
Could somebody help me fix this.

Thank you
 
Some Toshiba Laptop drives will ID as slave only, try to enable SLAVE on the contoller that your TOSH HDD is on :O) Hope that helps... Mater tua criceta fuit, et pater tuo redoluit bacarum sambucus
Magnus frater spectat te...
 
1. You have to set up your hard drive in the BIOS for cylinders, tracks, sectors also.

2. There is a jumper on the back of the hard drive to set for master, slave , cable select.

3. You can also change the boot order in the BIOS or leave it off the boot order.

4. Then you have to partition the drive.
a. If you to use Win 95/98 or XP with DOS16 or DOS32 partitions, then a boot disk with FDISK needs can be used to partition, make extended partitions and assign logical drive letters, and make one partition the one bootable partion as needed.
b. With XP and some other operating systems it is better to use the software on the install CD if your CDROM is bootable. Older computers may not have a bootable CDROM drive. To get a cdrom to work you might have to use a boot disk from a win98 so you can access the CDROM in some cases and format it with DOS32 and load the CDROM drivers manually. Usually the Mitsumi CDROM drivers downloaded from the internet can make the CDROM usable on an older computer.

5. In XP if you have a bootable CDROM, XP will prompt you to make a partition/format. I have never tried it on a clean hard drive that has never been used.
If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top