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Will not detect hard drive

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8 replies

by red dragoon 1 view

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I have a customer who bought a computer from our company four years ago. He wants to have a new hard drive put in. The old hard drive was a 6gb Western Digital. The new hard drive is a 40gb Western Digital. The BIOS will not detect the new hard drive. I have checked the jumper settings and have changed IDE cables. What am I doing wrong? Or will this work at all?

8 replies

by timwalsh

You will need to either update the BIOS, or use the BIOS overlay software that probably came with the hard drive.

by oz_media

First of all, I assume this is being added as a second drive. WD drives and thier 'jumper' settings will differ whether the instrucs are in French, English, Spanish etc. I installed a WD drive this morning, the French and English instructions showed different jumper settings for slave. Try all combos to be sure, it was a completely different setup than shown to get mine going. Only hook it up to the same ribbon as the existing drive, it will be a headache if sharing ribbon with a CDRW (don'tlaugh, I've seen it).

Secondly, WD drives are not preformatted, you should have a disk with Data Lifeguard Tools on it with the new drive. This is a DOS and Windows disk that will configure and format the new drive.

FINALLY: WD offers 90 dayinstallation support for ALL drives. If it is a new drive, call WD at 1-800-275-4932 That's 1-800-ASK-4WDC ("Have your Visa or Mastercard ready, our operators are standing by")Just kidding, support is free.

by oz_media

Tim is also right in saying the BIOS must be compatible with the larger drive, some older builds won't support more than a 10 Gig.

by thechas

I would install a new PCI IDE controller card.

In addition to properly recognizing the new hard drive, it will have a much faster data transfer rate.

But, it is worth your time to check for a BIOS update for the motherboard.
I would only flash the BIOS if the new version specifically addresses detecting larger hard drives.

In BIOS settings, make sure that the IDE channel is enabled and set to auto-detect.

The note on jumper settings is critical on WD drives.
For most WD drives, the jumper setting is different for master with slave present than it is for single drive as master.

Chas

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