I have just installed a seconhand motherboard into a machine and connected the known HDD to IDE1 (primary) with a known working cable. I then used the Award bios autodetect and the drive was not picked up. I then entered the sectors, cylinders and heads in manually and the drive was still not found. I altered the mode from Auto to Normal, LBA and Large but none worked. I then tried 5 other hard drives ranging in volume from 400mb to 8gig and none were detected. I also tried additional power connections (although the drive spins up each time) and I tried different IDE cables (and around the other way to ensure I had pin 1 matching up correctly) still no good. I then set up a drive manually on IDE2 (secondary) and it was found fine.
If it helps the motherboard is a SY-5BT and the bios is an Award Bios v4.51PG, the main HDD I am trying to get going is a Seagate ST36451A. I only have the one HDD connected when attempting to auto detect (ie I dont have the CD drive or additional HDD’s plugged in) and I have tried to set the jumpers on the HDD as Single Drive and also Cable Select (I tried the others too such as Slave, Master with ATA Slave etc just to check) I also tried another IDE cable from my other working machine and a brand new round IDE cable straight out of the bag also – still no good!)
Does this indicate that the Primary IDE controller is faulty? or am I missing something that you can see?
