Can't autodetect new bigger HD - mother board too old?

[grahambell]

Hi,

Bought new HD due to Windows probs with existing one, but just tried installing it using BIOS auto detect and though the screen comes up saying 'auto detecting primary HD' or whatever, that's as far as it gets.

As my crappy PC was built by an ex-mate using what turned out to be old second hand parts I'm just wondering if the new 40Gb HD is too big for the old BIOS to cope with. Originally came with 2.1Gb HD which failed and I replaced with 10Gb which installed fine.

[greenlandy]

Have you got the both drives connected? Have you checked for the jumper for master/slave/Cable select(CS)?

[Zad]

It does sound to be quite an elderly machine. If all else fails then you should be able to get a IDE card with its own BIOS that will take much larger drives for only a few quid.

[grahambell]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Originally had jumper set to cable select and when that got nowhere changed it to master with the same result.

Guess I need either a newer motherboard or a smaller HD, though 40gb was the smallest I could find new.

[greenlandy]

You could go to the MB home page and flash the BIOS with a later one. make sure you read the instructions first though and make a backup of your original bios.

HTH Matt

[twister]

Some drives have a jumper setting which forces them to behave like a smaller drive, so they can be recognised by older BIOSes - if you really don't need the extra space and don't want to fork out for a separate IDE interface card, this might be an option for getting you up and running again.

[thepassenger]

This trick might work.

Take a look at the sticker on the drive, it should have C/H/S settings (Cyclinders, Heads, Sectors). Jot them down on peice of paper and go in to the BIOS, if it's a relativley modern one... but has issues with large drives then manually setting the C/H/S figures will trigger a workaround.

Of course it could be a REALLY old BIOS that doesn't have 32/48bit adressing, in which case set the jumper to master and then set the jumper that brings the drives avaliable space to X.

The other alternative is to go and get a PCI HDD controller card (if this is a desktop machine) and hand the new drive off that... thus bypassing the machines original BIOS.