[RESOLVED] Hard drive not recognized after reset or soft boot(ctrl/alt/del)

I'm repairing and upgrading a Packard Bell system (PB 4220 CD) with a 60 MHz Pentium proc. and Intel 433LX chipset for a friend. I replaced the original 408MB HDD with a 2 GB drive, added more memory for a total of 40 MB (originally was 24MB). While replacing the hard drive found the 40 pin/wire ribbon cable torn across three wires (all 3 open). Replaced the cable did an FDisk and format in preparation to load Win95 (upgrade from 3.1). However, everytime the system would restart, either automatically during the Win95 loading process or manually by me, the hard drive would not be recognized by the BIOS, nor would it be after rebooting with the reset button or doing a ctrl/alt/del restart after
getting the message, "Drive Not Ready Error, Insert BOOT diskette in A:". Even after doing a restart from Win95, the same thing happens
everytime! The only way to get the hard drive to come up and boot would be after performing a power off routine by pushing the power button off and on or doing a system shutdown from Windows and then powering off and repowering on again. Of course, this is an AT style mobo and power supply, so the front panel power button is directly controlling (wired to) the power supply. I've tried every option in the CMOS setup, which isn't a whole lot since an OEM version BIOS - AMI BIOS, 1.00.09 BCOR. I've tried setting the various
timeouts and delays for the HDD to different values, then when none of those worked, I reset the BIOS defaults. I configured the drive (both drives in fact, the original
and the 2 GB) manually and also let the BIOS do it automatically - NOTHING I've tried so far makes a difference! I replaced the 2 GB drive with the original 408 MB drive, and replaced the ribbon cable again, all to no avail! I'm tending to believe it's something to do with the motherboard like a jumper in the wrong place maybe - who knows! However, after visiting Ray's Packard Bell site (a great web site for just about anything related to Packard Bell systems) I found what motherboard I'm dealing with (an Intel 520r with an initial 8 MB of Ram integrated on it) and a diagram of the board and jumper ID's and settings. Everything matched for default and normal operation.

Other than this frustrating problem, the system seems to be working well.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks - Mal

I would try another ribbon cable and/or power supply

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An obstacle is something you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

Did it have a problem with the original drive too? If so the only other thing I can think of is a proprietary cable. If not it's probably having trouble with the hard drive being over 520MB. I've seen some old PB have that problem even though the Bios "detected" them. Other than that I'd have to agree with the previous post, new power supply. Good luck and let us know.

GLSmith

I had a computer once that did just the opposite.

It is a server in a small real estate office, and it runs 24/7. Every once in awhile, they will call because the power went out and the machine will come back up to a "Insert Boot Disk" error. I have found that when you turn this machine on cold boot, it will not see a hard drive. You press reset or Ctrl-Alt-Del and it sees it fine. It seems as if on the initial power-on sequence, the drive does not have enough time to spin up before the BIOS is done with the POST and ready to boot.

I never found a real fix to this, other than just telling them to hit reset after they get that message, and it's no big deal since they very rareley have power failures.

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Now that you mention it 3fingersalute, I have encountered a system or two like that too. I think we ended up setting the bios to delay longer to wait for the hd to get up to speed or something like that. It was a long time ago. That brings up another point maybe the Bios is just plain toast?!?

GLSmith

Well, I finally figured out what was going on. I was working on more than one system at the time and got myself a little confused at one point. I had another system with a hard drive problem as well, and after troubleshooting, swapping cables, drives, and messing with conf./BIOS settings on two sytems at once, I made an error - first one in my life, believe me ;-).

The original 428 MB drive did work properly when I reinstalled it, both during a cold start and warm boot (although originally, it did have a damaged ribbon cable which I replaced). The AMI BIOS was dated 11/94 according to SiSoft's SANDRA information/diagnostic software. I know that any BIOS dated before August of 1994 was suppose to have the 528 MB barrier, but this BIOS was supposedly dated Nov. '94, and therefore(theoretically anyway, but with AMI and Packard Bell who knows), should've been compatible up to the next capacity barrier of anything greater than 2.1 GB. Therefore, after installing the Maxtor 2.1 GB, partioning and formatting it without any problems I figured the BIOS was translating
the drive properly. The full capacity was recognized (actually 1.918 GB after partion/formatting), the BIOS recognized it during cold start up and Win95 loaded and was/is running fine. Although the Win95 version I'm using is the 1st edition, or "A" version I think some people call it, so it also has a HDD capacity barrier of anything greater than 2.1 GB. So I figured if I had a BIOS problem, the drive would either not be recognized at all, the system would hang, or it would only format to the 528 MB limit. Since this was not the case, I got myself into a mindset that it had to be something else (i.e., jumper settings, BIOS settings, memory, add on cards, motherboard, cables, and finally power supply. Of course, some of
these things I thought might be somehow causing the problem really felt like a strecth, but when you get a certain mindset and accompanying tunnel vision while becoming desperate, you'll try just about anything! I tried a new power supply which made no difference, so I got the last resort
kind of idea to try a IDE controller PCI card with its own onboard BIOS. I had a Promise Technology card laying around so I popped it in and guess what, the 2.1 GB finally would do a warm boot, a reset and windows restart, as well as the cold start. I'm still not 100% convinced that the problem is in the BIOS. I still have a thought that a possible logic circuit on the mobo related to the reset, warm boot procedure may still be at
fault, but it very well could just be the old AMI BIOS all by itself - really hard to know without detailed schematics and actually tracing logic signals around the mobo. Definitely something I'm not inclined to do for time sake and migraine prevention.


And yes, it is a 60 MHz and my friend uses it for word processing, email, and his young children play simple games on it. It's sort of like a family pet, they've grown attached to and want to keep it. They do have another system much more up to date - a 700 MHz Athlon T-bird system I put together for them.

Thanks for everyones input!

Mal