[link590o]

i had a 40 gig maxtor hard drive that i tried installing windows xp on with my new custom built compy. i wanted to use that one because it worked on my last setup. a dell 2400. it failed, so i gave up and tried a western digital and that worked great.

well now, i wanted to just use that maxtor for the old dell 2400 permanently. make it the primary drive, and install xp on it so my bro could take it and have fun with it.

so i plugged it in as the master drive, powered up the comp, and immediately i got two loud beeps. two short ones. and the comp said Primary drive wasn't found. hit F1 to continue or F2 to run setup utility.

i double checked the boot sequence, and the setup in the bios, and this is what i saw. primary master drive was set to auto, labeled as Unknown Device, dvd drive checked out ok.

i rebooted, got the same error, then just hit F1 and went into the windows XP setup. it loaded everything up, and when i hit enter to enter the setup and format the drive, it gave me that infamous message. Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed on your computer. blah blah blah check the setup configs, or run a manufacturer utility.

Great...now what do i do? is this disk even bootable? is there a way i can force it to work? i don't have any spare drives. (btw this is a regular IDE/ATA drive. not sata.) i don't have a floppy drive either.

the strangest thing of all was the following...when i was using the dell, i had both the western digital and the maxtor installed on that computer. the maxtor was the slave. one day my master drive had an error, and i needed to reinstall XP. so i tried reinstalling it on the maxtor, and it worked fine then. now i try it by itself, and it's failing horribly.

ideas please? :(

[samjohnson]

Hey, did you try running it as slave in you new comp to double check to see if it is even working? Just a thought that it may have broke... but maybe not. That is really my only suggestion.

sounds like you got your comp built, send me a pm in the other site we are in and I will give you my e-mail address to send me pics. :D

[link590o]

i fail to see how that would help me really...even if i mirrored my main drive onto that slave, i'm not sure it'll work. the motherboard doesn't seem to recognize it anymore. i don't really know why because it did so before. but plugging it into my new compy won't really solve anything.

i need some kind of a bios fix, or some sort of a software change that i can do at start up to make it recognize my maxtor drive. and i'm not even sure if such a fix exists.

the only real reason i'm pursuing this in the first place is because i managed to install a second copy on the maxtor once before. so i thought i could use it again.

but anyway...yeah..i'll head over there now and send you that PM.

in the meantime...if there is a fix for this, and i haven't found it, someone...please enlighten me. i would like to see this work without me having to buy another hard drive.

that's a last resort...

if i can't get this to work, it looks like i'm forced to buy a sata drive earlier than i expected, and i'll have to get this rig setup with sata and relegate the old western digital back to the p.o.s. dell i have.

that's not so difficult...but i don't know if i want to spend the remainder of my cash on a drive right now.

[philthomas]

If the drive fails to work in both PCs then it sounds probable, from what you've said, that it may just have died.

I think samjohnson's idea of slaving it to your new PC, wasn't meant to be a sloution, but just a further test to see if the drive is deceased. I would try that, because there is no simple bios fix that I know of and this will prove things one way or the other.

If the cabling and jumpers are all ok and it doesn't function, or appear in Disk Management, then I think you have to bite the bullet and accept the worst .... it could just be that moving it around didn't do it any good

[Kolubive]

use the low level format software of ur harddisk website to format the HDD in default mode

then try to install it again

[link590o]

i've simply accepted the circumstances meantime. i won't even bother. because if it's that much effort simply to raise this piece of junk from the dead, then it's not worth any more effort on my part.

i know for a fact that it hasn't died. it was working all the way up until a day or two ago when i took it out of the old dell and attached it to my new pc. so i know it's still good. it's apparently just not bootable anymore.

so i've bitten the bullet and i ordered a brand spankin new sata 160 gig 7200 rpm earlier this afternoon around 1pm. it should arrive most likely by wednesday at the latest since newegg doesn't ship weekends.

i'll simply relegate the western digital drive i'm using right now to the old dell, and perhaps maintain the slave configuration i was using before. that dell can use all the spare page file and hard drive space it can get. so i'll give the full 80 gigs to it, and i'll just use the new baby.

i would've done this eventually, but i was hoping my current ide drives could tide me over long enough so i could save up for a video card first. it looks like the order was reversed on me...

shame..but there is nothing i can do.

thanks for the help guys.