going crazy - harddrive

[Menaice]

OK heres the deal iam about ready to rip my head off yea its that bad. I got this HP pavilion 551w in the shop. (long time customer) he had a 40 gig samgung hd in it. I ran a check on the hd and it has a bad sector in it causing the computer to run slow. Now the jumper setting on the original HD is set to Cable select. I installed a new Seagate caviar 160gig hd. Reinstalled windows did all the updates installed the drivers and restored the files back to the machine. Computer reboots and then it says no bootable media. when its restarted like 4 to 5 times prior. So i pulled the new hd out and ran a scan on it works fine. I hooked up the Old hd to it and it booted straight into windows. So i know the cable is good and the IDE Header/controller are good as well. Now when i hook the new HD 160 gig up to it i get nothing. It doesn't see it in POST i go into the bois and get nothing. I can switch it from "auto" then to "none" then back to "auto" and it will see the drive in the BIOS. THen when i restart the machine and look on POST on the primary controller it blank and doesn't see the drive. So iam frustrated i don't know what else to do.... Could there be a compatibly issue with the new hd and the system? if that is the case then why did it go fine the first time i put the new hd in any and all input is appreciated

 

[Menaice]

25 views and no one has any opinions? or advice?

 

[angry_geek]

Agree with ACG. If you have a spare ide hdd around, try that.

 

[robrich22]

Hmm.. Did you check the power cable on the drive and make sure its not loose or anything?

Flash to the latest BIOS?

Is there maybe another controller you can use?

 

[Galdorf]

Wait how old is this pc the bios my not support over 80gb look for a new bios for the motherboard, flash it then try it.

Only other way i know of if you can't find a newer bios that supports > 80gb is to use an internal pci ide controller with raid.

 

[Menaice]

i just wanted to post an update on the problem, Incas anyone runs into this kind of situation before. The 160gig hd was to big for the Mobo, I flashed the bios and that didn't do anything. I finally found a used 80 gig hd i killed disked the hd and tested it for any errors put it in the system and works like a charm. So the only logical conclusion is the board just can't see that high of a hd.

 

[angry_geek]

That is one old mobo!

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

I've found on some old flat panel, swivel neck iMacs, the HD and optical from Apple can be set to cable select. I install a new HD leave it set at cable select and it won't load an OS, no matter how many times I try. Set the HD, optical to master/slave or master/master, loads OSX with no issues. This has happened to me so much with these iMacs I make sure I now set the jumpers accordingly. Just a thought from my perspective.

 

[Anne~]

The same exact thing happened to me last week with a customers computer. I had set the new bigger hard drive I had switched out to master and it was an older computer too. I then jumpered it to cable select and it worked beautifully.