Swapping hard drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gene Puhl
  • Start date Start date
G

Gene Puhl

This has got me beat.
My old PC is an A7Pro, a budget model of the A7V, even shares the same Bios
image, which I've upgraded to ver.1011 to handle 32 bit hard drives.
It was happily running a 1200mhz Duron and 20 gig Seagate Barracuda.
I am now running an A7N8X-X with a 40 gig Seagate Barracuda.
I decided to remove the plain 40 gig Western Digital from my wife's machine,
which is an Asus P5A-B K6-2-500 running the final beta BIOS, and install it
in the A7Pro.
The BIOS detects the hard drive, enumerates the model, scans the rest of the
IDE devices and immediately declares the hard drive has failed.
Running Fdisk from a boot floppy says there is no fixed disk present.
I've tried it with cable select, master with no slave, master with slave.
I then installed a little Connor 1.2 gig as primary boot device with the WD
as a secondary master. After installing Windows, the WD is visible to Windows
and I can open files from it, even though the BIOS says it doesn't exist.
The BIOS is set to auto-detect, after trying the "user" and "large" settings
to no avail. The case has a new 400W power supply as well, which was powering
2 ATAPI devices, one hard drive and 3 auxiliary fans.
Any clues?.....
BTW, returned the WD to the P5A-B and it happily booted...
 
You might want to have a hard look at your cables and make sure they're
right way round and properly seated. I've had dead drives come to life
simply by reseating the cables.
 
DDO s/w?

Please post a follow-up.
Ron
Click to expand...

Surely with the broadband capabilities available these days, you could have
spared a few more bytes...WTF are you talking about?
 
Sorry. I had it in my mind that it was a long shot...so it seemed natural
to keep it brief.

I was referring to (D)ynamic (D)isk (O)verlay software. A rather elderly
utility that used to be pretty popular for people who wanted to install
drives with a capacity larger than that recognized by their mobo.

It resided in the boot sector of the HDD, and would create problems when the
drive was moved into a system that DID recognize capacities larger than the
[then] maximum of...umm...I think it was 8.4GB, or something like that.

Anyway, your description made me think of that.

Otherwise -- and I'm sure you're 'way past this point already -- where did
you attach the WD drive? You said you tried a variety of jumper
positions...but you didn't say whether you had it on the PRI or the SEC
channel. I ask because maybe you need to alter the jumper on the 'Cuda
too(?)

Best of luck.
Ron
 
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