Western Digital Caviar 120 GB question

[AndrewLChang]

Hi, I've got a question about a Western Digital Caviar 120 GB hard drive that I bought from Dell a few weeks ago. It was the one that was listed on the Deals page on 4/23/02. Anyways, I tried to install it today as the Primary slave so that I could copy everything over from my current hard drive. However, after I went into the BIOS and set the setting to Auto detect and restart the computer upon exiting, the computer hangs while trying to detect the Primary Slave.

I've made sure that the jumper is set to slave. My current Hard Drive is a Maxtor 20 GB. The motherboard is an older Abit BH-6 revision 2. The only other thing on IDE is a CD-ROM on the Sec. Master. The WD seems to spin up so power doesn't look to be an issue. What could the problem be? Thanks!

[sbp]

It very well may be that old motherboard may not even support that big a hard drive.

[maruko]

I had a similar problem with mine too. I fixed it by getting a new motherboard since my old ASUS didn't have ATA100 support. This drive, I think, requires an ATA100 controller and an ATA100 cable.

[AndrewLChang]

Well, the current Maxtor 20GB hard drive is also ATA100 and works without problems. . . though I guess it could be that the WD requires a ATA100 controller. . .any other thoughts?

[Heihachi]

Is there ways to mess w/ that lba chs stuff .... if you have them in a raid 0 config?

[LPMiller]

Ensure...insure...something, that the Maxtor is set to master. Also make sure you are using an ATA100 cable, the WD won't work on any other kind.

As for the bios settings, it depends on the board. Mine works just fine set to auto - damn this is a fast drive - but sometimes you have to force a bios to 'do the right thing'.

[bachviet]

I set mine to auto and cable select! It works fine as primary with a 40GB IBM as slave! I think your problem is the jumper setting (cable select)!

[NuTs62]

Originally posted by LPMiller
As for the bios settings, it depends on the board. Mine works just fine set to auto - damn this is a fast drive - but sometimes you have to force a bios to 'do the right thing'.

so considering that I have my drives on RAID, connected to my RAID card, it shouldn't be any problem with the setting right? just depends on my RAID bios?

[AndrewLChang]

I changed over the jumper setting to CS and the computer still hangs as the MB goes to detect the IDE drives. I tried putting the WD120 on the Secondary position without any other drives, but I still wasn't able to have any success. Has anyone ever been able to get the drive to work on only ATA66 MB's (an Abit BX-6 rev.2)? That's the only thing I think that can be the problem is the drive is ok.

Also, I noticed that the drive heated up quite a bit after being on for a few hours, much more so than the other components in the computer -- is that normal?

[LPMiller]

it is a hot running drive.

Considering the problems Bur had getting his running with ATA66 cables, it is quite possible it is not liking the ATA66 port. It SHOULD be backwards compatible, but that doesn't mean anything.

[AndrewLChang]

Ok, I got the drive to detect after I downloaded the newest BIOS update for the ABit BX6 2.0 MB. Now the problem I'm running into is when I fdisk the thing, and I use the FAT 32, it'll only partion it into a 70 GB drive. I can't seem to be able to fully use all 120 GB. What could the problem be?

[Markel]

What OS are you using? Some (such as Windows 98) had an updated fdisk to handle larger drives.

[AndrewLChang]

I'm using Win 98. How do I go about getting the updated fdisk?

[Markel]

Originally posted by AndrewLChang
I'm using Win 98. How do I go about getting the updated fdisk?
Here's the MS knowledgebase article that will take care of this for you:

Fdisk Does Not Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB (Q263044) (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q263044)