Hard Drive not beeing detected

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elsaluno

Geek Trainee
I Have a p4 system. A couple of months back I came hoem and my system was making explosion sounds. I unplug the computer and the next day there was a smell burning rubber. I removed the power supply took it to the place I bough it and got a new one. Things did not get better! Got a new K7SEM mother board, new ide cables, and did a rma with maxtor for the hdd. What is my problem? I partioned the hdd in another computer running w2kpro but when I tried it in the other system the drive is not detected. I go into bios and set to auto every thing looks ok. When I run the set up disks and it is ready to install win98, win2kpro it says there is not fixed disk. Do you have any solution to this problem? Very frustrated and sad. Thanks for the help in advance.
Elsaluno
 
have you tried another hard drive in the system, as something might be wrong with the HD. also check that the cables are connected correctly, because sometimes you do have to push quite hard to get them in place.
 
its detected in the BIOS though right? also what format is it? FAT or NTFS? thanks
 
I am still having problems with this hard drive not being detected! If I have replaced the IDE cables, the mother board, the hdd; the power supply and the cd-rom why am I having this problem? The only thing I have not replaced is the processor. Can this be the problem? When I go to the bios I can not manually enter the cylinders and sectors. Any suggestions? Geting desperate! The only stuff detected when booting up is the memory and cd rom.
thanks
 
What hard drive is it? And what motherboard?
Does it pass POST?

I doubt your cpu is bust, they are usually the last thing to go in a computer.

If you got any bootup floppys with the drive use those first. The Win9x bootup disks are also good.
If it still doesnt work try the WinXP or 2000 bootup disks, it could be NTFS compressed without you realising. I inadvertantly converted mine to NTFS simply because I was asked if I was gonna use WinXP. It didnt say a word about actually doing the conversion.

If you cant boot from any disks try putting the drive as a slave in a second computer. Just use the cable select jumpers to do this, its the easiest way.
Then either use a bootup disk to boot to dos and run dir, or boot into windows and see if its recognised. If it is try filling the drive or even running a benchmark program to test it.

If it isnt recognised by windows or dos I would re-check to see if you can manuelly select the cyclinders, heads and sectors. Most if not all bios' will let you do it, especially P4 boards.

You will have to select User Define to do this.

Best of luck. Post us your HDD and motherboard though, you never know what info the net holds!
 
Zeus; When I go into the bios I only have the following options: None, Auto or Manual for IDE primary Master and Access Mode is CHS, LBA, Large and Auto. I normally choose auto but the Capacity=0 Cylinder=0, Head=0, Precomp=0, Landing Zone=0 Sector=0. I can not modify the any of these fields even if I choose manual or none. I partioned the drive in another system, but when I moved it over it was not recognized. When I tried to install win2kpro after the 4th diskett it comes back with the error message "no fixed disk exists" it should asked me if I want to install in this partition, format or something but it says there is no fixed disk.
 
I also get Disk I/O error when starting the system and trying to boot from the set of 4 win2kpro set up disks. I believe that I have tried just about everythin. If the system detets my memory, cd rom what could be causing the hdd not to be detected guys?
thanks
Elsaluno
 
hmm sounds similar to my problem in the other thread named Hardrive problems.. mine too is a Maxtor
 
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