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HD occasionally visible never accessible

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by skj91

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i have a 4.3 gig Seagate ATA drive which is completely inaccessable and only very rarely will show up as recognized during POST. when it does appear i quickly F-key to a command prompt boot so i can try to FDISK and FORMAT the drive so it will be available to my system for extra storage, but always to no avail. the computer just hangs at 0% done while 'verifying drive integrity' when i try to create a Primary DOS partition (there are no partitions on it as i was able to accomplish deleting all partitions on it recently hoping that repartitioning and formatting it might solve the problem, which i still think would work if i could only get it create a new partition in the first place). i currently have it in the Secondary Slave position withanother Seagate ATA drive as Secondary Master (different model and size but ought to be compatible... shouldn't it ?) and that drive works fine. my Primary Master drive is a Western Digital and i have my CD-ROM as Primary Slave. i've tried the failing Seagate HD in all other possible combinations and positions in my system, both with position-specific jumper settings and with cable select jumpers, but the current configuration is the only one in which all three of the other drives (the WD, the working Seagate, and the CD-ROM) will work and work all the time. i've always gone into BIOS and specified the drives CHS settings under User Defined (as it never self-detects the drive) and it accepts the entered values fine so that's not the problem. obviously, i really don't care about retrieving the data that's on the drive because i'm just going to format it anyway. all i want is to be able to use it. can anyone give me any ideas as to what the problem might be and whther or not it's at allpossible to recover this drive ?

3 replies

by skj91

this happens to be the drive that came in my system when i bought this computer, and it worked when i bought it so there's no chance of incompatability with the Motherboard issues either. although i wouldn't know if incompatability with other added hardware is a possibility or not, but it doesn't seem likely that it would be since the drive sometimes appears and when it does, my system boots up into Windows just fine with no errors or warnings (if i don't intercept Windows boot-up to work in DOS, that is) and everything works normally (everything except for that one drive of course... Windows is oblivious to it whether or not it appears during POST). i'm living on a full-time college student's budget and with the price of books these days, $100 or bucks or so for even the cheapest of new HDs is just not an option (though i know it would be 10X bigger and better than the one i'm trying access).
i'm majoring in electronics technology but i am only just a self-taught computer system tech so i'm at the point where i'm out of my range of knowledge and out of ideas for experiments to try. can anyone help to expand my awareness here ?

by thechas

First, you will get more and quicker responses if you post this type of question in the Q&A forum instead of the discussion section.

1. You may not have enough power supply for all the devices you have. With 3 HDs, you want at least a 300 Watt supply. If your system is loaded with RAM, or a high end video card, 400 Watts would NOT be overkill.
When all 3 drives power up, the 1 drive may just be more sensative to the voltage drop on the 5 or 12 volt line.

2. Tripple check the jumper settings. Make sure that the master is set to master with slave present.

3. Try a different IDE cable. There are some cable select type cables floating around again.

4. ATA / DMA modes.
Your motherboard may not support mixed ATA / DMA modesan the same IDE channel.
Set the ATA / DMA options for the master drive to match the slave drive.

Will the secondary slave drive work if it is alone on the IDE channel?
If so, it is likely one of the above.
If the drive does not work as the only drive on the IDE channel, the controller electronics on the drive itself are likely damaged.

Chas

by skj91

well i've done #'s 2 and 3 several times, and the drive does not work at all whether it's the only drive present, master, slave or whatever. also both it and the drive on the same IDE channel are Seagate ATA drives, i don't know where any settings for ATA/DMA are, both drives say that's what that are on the outer case, so i figured that unadjustable. in the BIOS, i can select what DMA channels to enable, but it says nothing about ATA.
thanks for thoughts and input, if you have any other ideasi'd appreciate it.
so... i guess i'll post this in Q&A section then (this is my first time here so, i'm a bit ignorant about stuff. thanks again).

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