Is this a BIOS problem?

**gjwilson** · April 2nd, 2002, 11:11 PM

My friend lost the hard drive in her comp. the other day and decided to upgrade from the dead 8gig to a Maxtor 40gig. She had a friend who"knows computers" try to install and then she gave it to me. The problem I`m having is that her comp. doesn`t find the new drive....it just hangs in the POST looking for the primary master and finds nothing.I`ve checked the jumper setting on the drive several times and replaced the ide ribbon. I`ve put it into my newer unit and it is seen just fine.
Her comp. has an Award bios dated 1998. Does it just need an updated bios flashed?

**KenKun** · April 2nd, 2002, 11:26 PM

Yep, i think it is a BIOS issue, it is a 4 years old BIOS ..
Get the newest BIOS you find for the MoBo and flash it, then after rebooting your HDD should be detected fine =hopefully=

Regards

**sharder8** · April 2nd, 2002, 11:26 PM

That is a common problem when the BIOS is old enough to not recognize the larger HDD sizes. I would try going to the manufacturer's site and getting the BIOS flash that corrects this problem.

The reason I didn't say to get the latest is sometimes that creates more problems than it corrects.

Harder

P.S. How's the weather in S. MN?

**MDS** · April 2nd, 2002, 11:27 PM

Have you tried the old drive on another computer also? Does it detect the cdroms in bios ? If not the controller may have went South. What mobo is it? It may not hurt to check for bios update.

**gjwilson** · April 2nd, 2002, 11:38 PM

Thanks....I kind of figured that was the problem.
Sharder8.......it`s cold and we just got 3" of snow. A typical spring here in Uff Da land.
MDS.....actually I`ve been able to revive the old drive but was unable to recover any of the old data. She stillwants the bigger drive.
Now I need to figure out what mobo is in this beast. That could be a question for later. Thanks, Gary

mickwish · April 2nd, 2002, 11:50 PM

I would have thought if it was a disk size limitation the BIOS would still detect the drive but report it incorrectly.

Anyway, try to upgrade the BIOS if you can and see if it helps. If you can't upgrade the BIOS, or if it doesn't help, you may need to consider an add-on IDE card to let this size drive be used, as a DDO won't work if the BIOS won't detect the drive at all...

Also wonder if the BIOS is set to detect IDE correctly. Maybe Primary IDE is set to off or something. Try a diff smaller drive on the same cable if you can.

Cheers
Mick

**gjwilson** · April 4th, 2002, 04:24 AM

mickwish......Thanks for the response. I made sure the bios was set to auto-detect and it showed nothing. I have flashed the BIOS upgrade with success but still had to go back into the bios and manually list the cylinders,heads...etc. before it would finally"see" the drive.It`s working fine now thanks to a search in the TECHIMO search file that gave me some great sites for motherboard IDs and BIOS upgrading. Gary