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HDD not being auto detected by BIOS

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9 replies

by nevernessit

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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?

9 replies

by lmon

Have you tried flashing the bios. Or have you gone to your mb manufacturer website to see if this is a known issue. If all that has attempted I would assume it is a faulty IDE controller.

by thechas

Before declaring the IDE controller bad, do a few checks:

In BIOS settings, integrated peripherals, are the IDE controllers enabled?

Triple check the IDE cable orientation.

Verify that the IDE cable is NOT a cable select style cable. Cable select cables have a small hole in the wires near one of the connectors.
If you do have a cable select cable, the jumpers on the drive should be set to cable select.
The cable connector used determines whether the drive is master or slave.

Verify that the jumpers on the drive are set correctly.
Many drives have different settings for single then for master with slave present.

Verify that the drive spins up and runs it's own POST at startup.
If you listen carefully, the drive should spin up and perform a seek operation.

If all of the above check out, then the IDE controller is the likely source of your problem.

Chas

by nevernessit

The drive does spin up and do a POST. The jumpers are all set ok and I have tried different cables. The drive is detected on the secondary IDE fine. Looks like it is the primary IDE.

by csmith

The usual check here is to turn off the IDE controller in the BIOS and put a IDE card in the PC.
If the BIOS then can see the hard drive, the onboard controller is bad.
Usually if you remove the controller from the motherboard, (Use an Air Desolderer) the controller is good about half of the time, and there is a broken connection in the board.
This is not worth doing nowadays, motherboards are, relatively, dirt cheap.
Regards, Chris

by nevernessit

No the CD rom did not get detected either. It must just be the primaary controller. I have set it all up on the secondary IDE. It just looks bad at startup now as I have disabled the primary so the HDD and the CD both come up as being detected on as secondary master and secondary slave. Oh well.

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