W2K3 installation does not detect hard drive

I have a PC that I got from someone else. I am trying to install W2K3 on it, I mean on the drive that I got with the PC. For some reason, the setup does not detect the hard drive. I even tried with a brand new HD but I ran into the same problem. I am sure I am missing something but I am not sure what it is.

I tried all the connections possible with the 2 IDEs I have on the PC. I connected the drive as Master on IDE1 and Master on IDE2, slave on IDE1 and slave on IDE2 (I dont think these would work without a master)

Any ideas on how to approach this?

 

yes it would, try setting the drive (s) to C/SEL (cable select)

BTW: just post if you don't know what cable select is

 

I have a vague idea what C/SEL means just because I saw it in the installation manual of the new drive. It was pre-set set to C/SEL.
If I am right, you are talking about the pins setup next to the power point of the drive. Istn't it? The drive that I am trying to use has the small plastic thing on the extreme left on top and bottom.

 

Make sure the drive is being detected in BIOS. If it's not being seen there, your Win2k3 install won't see it either.

 

I think the drive is detected in the BIOS. I want to add that before the windows setup starts, it gives me the arrays detected on the system. I hope that means the drive. It shows the capacity of the drive and the type of array, in my case, it is FUNCTIONAL

 

yep, C/SEL uses the drives location on the IDE cable to define which drive / device is master or slave, the drive / device on the end of the cable is the master and the one in the middle (nearest the mobo)

good point B:doh:

 

it sounds like your trying to create a RAID (of you may have RAID selected as your primery boot device in the BIOS) you need to choose if you want to use RAID (up to 4 IDE HDD's) or use each IDE drives as an independant entity

 

I am still not able to resolve this issue with my HD. In the past couple of days, after doing more studying on the H/W connections, this is what I have.
The motherboard does not have a primary connector for a HD but has one for CD-ROM. The HD was connected to an IDE adapter through a PCI slot. So, I got rid of the adapter and connected the HD and the CD-ROM as master and slave to the single CD-ROM connector on the motherboard. Now when I boot the machine with the HD as master and:
CD-ROM as slave : does not boot from CD and says "Operating System not found"
CD-ROM as CS : boots from the CD but the setup does not detect the HD as before.
CD-ROM as master : did not try as both CD-ROM and HD cannot be master.

Any clues from this?

 

First check in your BIOS that if your computer is detecting the HDD or not....
Set CD drive as a master must be the go here....you dont need to worry about CS here.... just leave the jumpers as it is and set the things through BIOS....

 

The last time I checked the BIOS was when I connected the HD on the IDE1 of the IDE adapter through PCI card and the CD-ROM to the CD-ROM connector on the motherboard. The BIOS was showing the following:

Primary Master : None
Primary Slave : None
Secondary Master : CD-ROM
Secondary Slave : None

I dont know if it has anything to do with my issue but the above entries seemred to be readonly cause I was not able to move the control to them.

 

whats the mobo make & model ?

 

Is your BIOS detecting ur HDD after this??

 

Thats the part I forgot to check. I will let you know as soon as I do that.

Thanks.

 

There is two ways you can approach this.
1.Set all your jumpers on your IDE drives and opticals on Cable Select and it will automatically set your Master and Slave
--or--
2.Set your hard drives as Master/Primary as well as your Optical drives using the jumper pins.

For simplicities sake I'd just use Cable Select.

 

I have a good news and a bad news. Good news first, the setup detects the HD and I was able to install W2K3. As I said before, I used the CD-ROM connector on the motherboard to connect both the HD and the CD-ROM as master and slave. Either I understood the jumper settigns wrong or Maxtor put it wrong on the HD.

Now, the bad news, the OS keeps restarting itself. The first time it happened, I saw that the event viewer has some logs saying that there is some parity error on disk0 or something just before it restarted. So, i thought the HD was screwed up and installed the OS on a different HD. For the first 12 to 15 hours of installing, the system was OK but after that it started rebooting too with the same logs in the event viewer. That makes me wonder if it is the problem with the HD or something else that I am not looking at!!

?????

 

can u double click on the error and copy paste here...

 

Parity errors if I'm not mistaken can be caused by faulty RAM, run memtest.

 

These are the exact messages in the event log.
A parity error was detected on "\device\ide\ideport0" and
The driver detected a controller error on device\harddisk0.
Any ideas if this may cause the frequent rebooting of the machine??

 

Update all the drivers...mainly chipsets drivers and see if it goes away..

 

how do you do that. especially in this case, it restarts within 2 to 3 minutes from the moment it shows the CTRL+ALT+DEL dialog.