HD shows in bios, xp disc says no HD found

FTLOSM · 28-10-2008, 05:18 AM

I have a friends computer that the ide hard drive failed on (tested outside his computer via usb test device - it wont even spin up) so we stuck a known good ide replacement drive I had here in there for him so i could reload xp on it and get him going again.

Been thru this process dozens of times, bootscreen shows devices found as
primary hard drive (western digital 80 gig) and then it finds the cdrom drive as well.

In bios i have boot to cd then to HD, set the HD as master with jumper, (its the only drive in system) i inserted the xp disc, turned unit on goes thru the main screen where again i see the drives found (hd and cdrom) then boot to cd...

then the inspecting hardware sentence and the blue background INSTALL XP screen, at that point I hit ENTER to install xp and it says

Setup did not find any hard disk installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected. And any disk related configuration is connect. ect. press F3 to quit.

(yet the drive is fine and known good, and is showing in the bios and start up detection screens).

Never had this happen before any ideas?

Bill

FTLOSM · 28-10-2008, 06:02 AM

Fixed it, i had the hd set with a jumper to master, took that off and suddenly the xp setup started without an issue when i hit enter (after removing that master jumper).

I was digging thru the bios, google searching, all sorts of things, then thought why not take the jumper off master since its a single drive system, for whatever reason it seemed to fix the no drive found issue and xp is loading as i type.

PcTestCard.com · 28-10-2008, 07:30 AM

Try reset the Bios and remove the HDD jumper and let the system to recognize the HDD automatically.

I also got same situation on previous small size IDE HDD.

Manually search the IDE HDD in the Bios again will be a good try as well.

Hope this helps!
Bill

**Digerati** · 28-10-2008, 01:10 PM

I am glad you got it going and thanks for the followup.

It is odd it would not work as Master - you don't normally need a slave drive if you have a master, only the other way around. I suspect by removing the jumper (assuming it was set correctly to start), it defaulted to CS (cable select) which uses the drives position on the cable to determine Master/Slave settings. Still, the Master jumper should have worked. The fact it did not "suggests" there might be a controller issue. Your friend needs to ensure a good backup plan is in place.

**Dan Penny** · 29-10-2008, 04:50 PM

Western Digital drives are kind of unique in that, as a single drive, (on one IDE channel) no jumper is the correct jumper setting. Setting the jumper to MASTER tells it that there is another drive, hence the confusion to the machine. They don't default to Cable Select, this must be set with the jumper. (I've never seen a drive that operates like this. A jumper to select CS must always be utilized.)

(Ten pin jumper/drive shown, but the jumper setup applies to most WD drives.)