Not recognizing the hard drive

[yeager78]

I recently bought a 20 GB Maxtor hard rive to replace my old 2.4 GB hard drive on my 200 MHz Athlon processor computer. I tried to install the hard drive and the computer never recognizes the drive! I've hooked it up as primary and slave on both of my cables and still once I go into windows 98, the hard drive is not recognized on the "My Computer" window. What do I need to do to get this drive installed? I was going to replace the 2.4 GB with the new 20 GB drive because I am out of bays so I have to somehow get the thing to work. I apologize for the babbling but I just cannot seem to get the darn thing to work. Any help would be appreciated! Besides, if worse comes to worse I could always pay to have it professionally done, at an outrageous rate I'm sure

 

[Monk_]

Have you run fdisk and format on the new drive?

 

[~Candy~]

Did you attempt to set it up with the floppy disk that came with it?

 

[yeager78]

I tried booting with the floppy disk that came with the hard drive but all that happens is that the screen says "Reading SYstem Information" and nothing happens, even after one hour.

 

[~Candy~]

Ok, are you going to transfer everything from you old hard drive to the new one?

If so, first off, make sure you have the new hard drive jumpered as MASTER, connected to the same ribbon with the old hard drive which should be jumpered as SLAVE....do you understand the jumper theory? If not, post back.....

Next, when the computer is restarting, you need to enter your bios setup to 'tell' it about your new hard drive and re-recognize your old hard drive.......once you've done that, place the Maxtor setup floppy in the a: drive and continue to boot.......you should be presented with a setup screen and be able to transfer your old drive to your new drive...

If you run across anything that doesn't sound like this plan, POST BACK before going further.....

And BTW, I thought I had the ultimate patience.....an hour eh???

 

[yeager78]

My problem is setting up the BIOS. Where do I get the necessary info to tell the BIOS to recognize my hard drive? I understand the ribbon thing with the master and slave but the whole BIOS thing baffles me. Thanks for the help so far!

 

[~Candy~]

When your computer is restarting there is a key you need to press to enter bios setup....most often it is DEL, Compaqs F 10, other computers F 1 or F 2....if you can't get there, post your computer information and someone will help.

And BTW, again, Welcome to TSG!!!!

 

[yeager78]

O.K., so I know how to access the BIOS screen, but just what do I need to do to get the computer to recognize my new hard drive? I just realized another problem I have, that is that I don't have my Windows 98 system CD. If I transfer everything over to my new hard drive, I don't have to worry about re-installing Windows, right?

 

[~Candy~]

Once you get there, you are going to have to look around for things that look like hard drive / ide information....some bioses have a 're-recognize' button, like F 3, others you have to choose user or default or auto......let us know what your choices are.

 

[yeager78]

I hit DEL when the computer started to boot up and got a blue screen with options such as CMOS settings and BIOS information. Neither contained anything involving IDE but I did find another category that said "IDE/HDD Auto Detection." This screen brought up choices for each of my primary master/slave and secondary master/slave settings. My primary master is where my hard drive is and it gave me three choices to select from under this heading. Some of the categories listed were "size, Cylinders, Heads, Precomp, Landz, Sector, and Mode" Now that I know where to go, what do I need to do?

 

[~Candy~]

Ok, well if it's showing actual numbers for the cylinders, heads, etc. that should be good enough.....does it show the size of the drives correctly?

 

[yeager78]

Where do I see if it shows the size of the drives correctly? All of the readings that I took were with the old hard drive hooked up. My new hard drive was not connected when I went into the IDE/HDD detection screen.

 

[~Candy~]

Ok, I think you're trying to make this more difficult than it needs to be.....

I assumed you had already hooked up the new drive.....

Go back and re-read my post indicating to set the new one up as master, etc.

Once you have BOTH drives in the machine, jumpered correctly, now go to your bios....it should be showing both drives, numbers for each of them, and the sizes.....if your cdrom is hooked up....it should also pick up an ATAPI device, CDROM, something similar.

Should be info for IDE 1, IDE 2, etc. or something similar.

Save changes....and reboot with the Maxtor disk in the floppy drive....

 

[columbo]

Hi,

Just to add in a suggestion, when I threw a 20gb Western Dig. drive into an old computer, all I had to do was apply the latest BIOS update, then format the drive. After rebooting, Windows was able to see the drive OK.
Maybe a firmware update is required (I noticed that this is a 200 MHz system).

Good Luck

 

[yeager78]

Where do I go to get the BIOS update? I assume this is just done by adding the hard drive and doing the BIOS and saving. BTW, thanks for all of your help!