[RESOLVED] Bios does not detect hard drive

Recently I bought a new hard drive Maxtor DiamondMax 40 and tried to install the neew hard drive. The Bios in the motherboard refuses to detect the hard drive even if it is placed on sec or primery channel. I have already tried using utility software from maxtor websie called maxblast and jumpon. Still bios refuses to detect the hardrive,the computer freezes during the detection. My hardrive is placed as the secondary prime. Currently I have Soyo 6VBA 133 motherboard with 4.51 award bios WD 10.2 hard drive on primary master ViperII video card with newest drivers and bios. The drive that I try to install is 40.9 gig HD.

check your jumpers

jumpers are set properly, still no effect

In standard CMOS
Do you have all drives on auto detect?
Are you sure your cables are on correctly?
Is the drive seen in fdisk?

The drive is setup correctly and cmos is set to auto. When I use Maxblast diagnostic utility provided by Maxtor, and I run it is detecting the hard drive, shows its all specs, and I can even partion the hard drive. But when i try to auto-detect it the bios refuses to detect it and during the detection process it freezes. Whatever I do in the bios put the detection on auto or user it fails to detect it. I think it has something to do with the bios. I read on the Maxtor web site that some of the Bioses will not detect the hard drives with the capacity greater than 32GB. I still have no answer to my problem. One thing I know is that the drive is fully functional and that my motherboards bios has something to with it.

The drive is setup correctly and cmos is set to auto. When I use Maxblast diagnostic utility provided by Maxtor, and I run it is detecting the hard drive, shows its all specs, and I can even partion the hard drive. But when i try to auto-detect it the bios refuses to detect it and during the detection process it freezes. Whatever I do in the bios put the detection on auto or user it fails to detect it. I think it has something to do with the bios. I read on the Maxtor web site that some of the Bioses will not detect the hard drives with the capacity greater than 32GB. I still have no answer to my problem. One thing I know is that the drive is fully functional and that my motherboards bios has something to do with it.

Your heading in the right direction
Get a bios update

The latest BIOS revision for your board is fairly recent - 5-26-2000, version 6VBA-2BA8. Give the BIOS update a shot, it might work.

http://www.soyo.com.tw/cgi-bin/prodi...486=&notebook=

If it doesn't work, you can try something else: use a user-defined set of parameters in the BIOS and then use the Max-blast software. Its not important that the BIOS recognize the drive at its full capacity - the overlay will take care of that. Try setting it to 1024 heads, 16 heads, 63 sectors. That would equal 504MB, which works with just about any drive.

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Steve Taylor - Service Manager
Altoplanos Information Systems, Inc.
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho

It almost sounds like an incompatibilty between your two drives
hers an idea
Set your boot hard drive as the primary master
Set the Maxtor as the seconday master and your cd rom as the seconday slave
the only jumper you will have to chamge is the one on your cd rom to make it go from master to slave
and make sure both your primary and secondary masters are on the ends of the ribbon cable, the slave should connect at the middle connector
I have seen this clear up this kind of problem
I hope this gets you going

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Format c:

HOLY ****! I have the SAME HD, and have ALMOST the same problem. I have an ABIT BE6 mobo w/ integrated support for the UDMA 66 for the HD. For your problem, I might try buying a Promise controller. When testing with my comp, the HD WOULD NOT work using the normal IDE slots, it had to be plugged into the UATA 66 slots. I also can see my HD in the Maxtor software, and partition it, but I still cannot see it in win98, dos, or anything else. Does show up on Linux install.. Now only if Linux supported UATA 66 hds.

https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif I will be coming back and telling you anything I find out. Note: Bios upgrades don't work either. Heh. Maybe it's the Abit Mobo? That is what you have, right?

alien.mars.sun

n/m on the Abit thing. Just caught myself https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/04/1.gif

I just got a Diamondmax 40 40.9GB drive and had the same exact prblem with my Asus P5A (computer would hang when trying to detect the new HD). To fix the detection problem I was forced to download a beta BIOS that was only available on the German Asus site. After flashing the BIOS, the hard drive was detected and I was able to use all 40.9 gigs.