Hard drive detection

Hi,

I'm putting together a computer for my brother and I ran into an annoying problem. First the specs:

Shuttle AK11 MB
700 MHZ AMD Duron
128 MB RAM
13 GB Western Digital HD
8x4x32 Atapi CD RW

I hooked up the HD as the primary master and the Atapi as the primary slave and I made sure the BIOS recognized it. When I insert a boot disk in (Windows ME CD is in the CD RW drive, too) and get to the A: prompt, I run FDISK and I get "cannot change a fixed drive" error. I then go to C: and type DIR and it displays all the contents of the WinME CD. The C: prompt is the CD RW and there is no other prompt for the HD. I also tried booting from the CD dircetly and it just hangs. Anyting else that I could do? Any help would be great!

 

Hi aerain,
Make sure your cables are connected correctly. Also make sure your jumpers are set to what you want.Pin 1 on the Hard Drive (Red line on cable) is nearest the power connector on the hard drive. Just a Thought!

 

Thanks for responding, TW56.

The cables are set correctly. The HD is on the Primary IDE cable whereas the CD RW is on the Secondary IDE cable. The red stripes are nearest the power supply already. And the jumpers are already set: HD is master and CDRW is slave.

 

Being that both devices are on the same cable and the cdrw works means the cable is plugged correctly into the motherboard.
If it's plugged into the hard drive correctly with the red stripe to the pin labeled 1 check the jumpers, makes sure it's jumpered for master dual installation.

Installing the new drive as the primary (Master) drive:

If you are connecting your new Western Digital hard drive as the Master drive on the cable with another IDE device, leave the existing jumper shunt on pins 1 & 2 and add a second jumper shunt to pins 5 & 6. Then configure the jumper on the other IDE device as Slave. Connect the drive to the black connector at the end of the cable, and the other IDE device to the gray connector located at the middle of the cable.

If the above doesn't work, disconnect the cdrw, boot with the startup disk, try to run fdisk again