[ad6id]

I have a 1995 AST 486 running Win 3.1. When I power on, it ahows AST Bios 1.02 and complains that it needs to init the hard drive. Several minutes later, it gives up, complaining it cannot determine the model or manufacturer and would I like to go to Setup.
When entering Setup, there is no option to select the drive model/Mfg. What secret incantation of keystrokes do I use to get to that part of the setup? I've tried F2 F8, cntl shiftalt F1thruF10 to no avail.

Tnx, Tony Armendariz

[plejon]

I had an AST a long time ago. If I remember correctly, you had to press CTRL + ALT + ESC or CTRL + ALT + DEL to enter the bios setup.

Once there, You should be able to indicate the cylinders.sector/heads of your harddrive

[alphanumeric]

Was this drive working OK before this happened or are you adding a new drive. If it won't autodetect you may have to enter the info manually. Should be a sticker on the drive with the heads cylinders sectors listed on it. If the drive size isn't supported in bios you may have to use a drive overlay. Now if this was a working drive then you could have problems. The drive may be going bad or you have a bad IDE cable.

[DaveBurnett]

Try removing and re-inserting the drive. Yes you will have to find the drive first and you may need to unscrew a few bits, but it is usually fairly easy to remove the disk. It will be in a cradle of some sort and possibly wrapped in some sort of foil.

[JayTheHun]

From what I recall, you have to manually enter the drive parameters (gotten from the top of the drive itself). Then, depending on the size of the hard drive, you'll have to use "overlay" software since those older BIOS cannot handle the larger drives, with typical thresholds of 600MB, 600MB, and 2.1GB.