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  • #2091608

    BIOS Indentifying HDD

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    by kettels ·

    A client recently called as his system wouldn’t bootup past POST. Voltage was only 4.27, so I replaced power supply. Scandisk replaced damaged FAT with copy and there were 5Mb of lost clusters on the drive. Since this happened, whenever I bootup or restart the BIOS takes a minute or two to “find” the HDD and CD-ROM. Sometimes it only finds the CD-ROM.

    I have the Auto Detect feature flagged in the CMOS setup. When I tell CMOS setup to auto-detect the drives, it does so only some of the time.
    I have added an HP CO tape drive and McAfee VirusScan recently, but the system had been running fine for a couple weeks.

    Thanks in advance.

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    • #3881528

      BIOS Indentifying HDD

      by bv2 ·

      In reply to BIOS Indentifying HDD

      Set your BIOS to reset configuration data, then reboot – it should search your hardware and load it fresh – you could also reset the CMOS by using the jumpers or by removing the battery for several minutes, then letting it auto detect with BIOS default settings.

    • #3867946

      BIOS Indentifying HDD

      by drdon ·

      In reply to BIOS Indentifying HDD

      Try resetting the BIOS to Factory Defaults. Also check the Tape and CD to make sure they are secondary devices. If there is a second IDE controller make sure the second device on it is a secondary device.

      Verify of course you have the latest BIOS for the machine, and that the controller was not damaged during the low power period.

    • #3865414

      BIOS Indentifying HDD

      by tommy.leerschen ·

      In reply to BIOS Indentifying HDD

      Both the previous answers are fine. But, why autodetect at all? Most bios’s have the ability to find the drive and set it. Or you can set the parameters manually if you’d like. I assume you aren’t changing drives all the time. So why detect what wasthere yesterday? Time to set it and forget it. It will speed up the boot time as well.

      Good Luck………..

      • #3865351

        BIOS Indentifying HDD

        by kettels ·

        In reply to BIOS Indentifying HDD

        As it turns out, I stumbled across the solution on another machine with a Western Digital drive…

        You may jumper this WD HDD as a Single, Master or Slave. It had been jumpered as Master. After I removed the jumper (making it Single), there was no problem with the BIOS finding the drive. I suppose the CD-ROM had originally been a slave on the Primary IDE, but was recently moved to the Secondary IDE, thus the WD HDD was “single”, but jumpered as a Master. I have seen many other drives jumpered as Master, with no slave and without problems. I guess just an uniqueness of WD HDDs.

    • #3865348

      BIOS Indentifying HDD

      by kettels ·

      In reply to BIOS Indentifying HDD

      This question was closed by the author

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