Dead Hard drive??? Help....

SonyGuy · 01-23-2005, 03:46 PM

Ok I got my board and processor in the mail yesterday and hooked everything up(My previous motherboard died on me so I had to get another one....). I'm using a Western Digital 80gb SE. When the board posts and reads everything out, it reads off the processor, the ram, and then sits there "Detecting IDE Devices...". After a while it finds a WD1200, but my drive is a WD800. It won't go any further than that screen. I went into the bios and had it detect the drive. It sat there for a minute, then came up with WD1200 and something like 8332mb for the capacity. I took a Seagate 4.3gb drive and hooked it up instead of using the WD drive and everything came up fine, it loaded into windows. Do I have a dead hard drive now or what? The drive was working fine before the board went down. I've just had the case sitting on it's side since my rig went down and now the hard drive suddenly doesn't want to work. Do I just need to give up and buy a new drive or what? I checked the jumpers and it's set to master. Don't know what's going on...

SnowSurfer · 01-23-2005, 04:03 PM

Is it the only hd in your case? do you have it on the primary ide channel? were u wearing an antistatic bracelet when you put the new mobo in?

navyones · 01-23-2005, 04:06 PM

I would try removing all jumpers from the hard drive, then powering it up. Let me know what it does then. I had the same problem with a new motherboard last year.

SonyGuy · 01-23-2005, 04:09 PM

It's the only HD I have in there. I wasn't wearing a bracelet, just grounded to the case. I'll take the jumper off the drive and try it again. Let you know in a minute...

SonyGuy · 01-23-2005, 04:17 PM

Ok, I took the jumper out, hooked everything up and cut it on. Same thing is happening.... I went into the bios and looked at the drive, here's what came up-

WDC1200BB
Capacity- 8455mb
Cylinder- 16383
Head- 16
Precomp- 0
Landing Zone- 16382
Sector- 63

It's coming up as a WDC1200BB which I believe is a 120gb drive and showing an 8gb capacity, but mine is an 80gb drive. wtf??

navyones · 01-23-2005, 04:25 PM

I borrowed this from another forum, but it seemed to apply to your specific installation.

Try troubleshooting the hard disk by looking back in the hard disk troubleshooting index and diagnosing the specific problem you are having (hard disk not recognized, won't boot, etc.) It is possible that a configuration, setup or cabling issue is what is at fault, and the disk will work properly once it is fixed.
Make sure that the new hard disk is set up with the correct translation mode in the BIOS setup of the new PC.
If you were using a dynamic drive overlay on your previous PC, you may have a problem when you move to a new machine that has native BIOS support, because the new system may enable translation when the overlay is expecting it to be turned off. One option is to go into the BIOS setup and turn off translation support by setting up the hard disk as "Normal" instead of "LBA", "Large" or whatever. However, this is not a great solution, since you are keeping the drive overlay when you don't have to. Instead, you should remove the drive overlay, and set up the disk with native large-disk support.
If you want to be safe, then perform a full backup of the disk before transferring it to the new system. Then, detect, setup, partition and format the disk on the new system, and transfer the contents back to the disk again. This of course is not without its risks also (the backup medium could fail, so be very careful) but will ensure that the disk is being set up in the correct new environment

SonyGuy · 01-23-2005, 04:29 PM

Ok so basically it is saying I need to go into the BIOS and turn translation support off by setting it to Normal? I was looking at this earlier but I don't remember what it was set on. Let me go look and see what it's set to...

Alright I didn't see anything on translation support on a quick glance through. I did see this...

"Access Mode"
-CHS
-LBA
-Large
-Auto

It was set on Auto. Is this for translation support or do I need to look again?

I don't understand where it is talking about removing the "drive overlay". If this is something that can be done from the BIOS then I'm all for it but anything other than that is not possible since I can't get the drive to boot up and is detected under a name not of it's own...

navyones · 01-23-2005, 04:39 PM

Well, since you can access the Internet; please try this link: http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/hardware/ts/ts-hdd.htm

It may be easier if you can actually read the original problem and see the solution.

SnowSurfer · 01-23-2005, 04:39 PM

im not sure if this would matter or not but is the drive being recognized as pio or dma?

SonyGuy · 01-23-2005, 04:46 PM

Snowsurfer- I'll check....

I looked through that site and it definately makes sense about the overlays. It was saying that BIOS's are different from one another in how they access a drive and if you change motherboards it may be reading it incorrectly. That I can believe since I went from an Asus(Award BIOS) to an ABIT(Pheonix BIOS). SO maybe that is my problem right there but I am still unsure on how to correct this problem...

zippyjuan · 01-23-2005, 08:52 PM

I had trouble with my ASUS board when I replaced a HDD. I changed the setting in Access to LBA and that did it for me. For some reason AUTO did not correctly identify my WD 80gb drive.

SonyGuy · 01-24-2005, 06:17 AM

I tried setting it to "Large" and to "LBA" and still nothing. What I am going to do is take the drive out, go over to my brothers house, and hook it up to his computer and format it. Then take it back over here and try it out on there again as well as clear the CMOS on my board. I am hoping that is going to clear this up. As much as I would like to buy this 160gb Seagate (8mb) drive off this guy for $80 shipped, I can't really afford it seeing as how for some reason when my previous board went down, I found myself needing not only a new board, but a new processor, video card, and an Antec 550 watt PSU

Oh well....

ceeka · 01-25-2005, 12:06 AM

Have you tried using another ide cable? I know you said the other HD worked, but try it if you have a spare.

SonyGuy · 01-25-2005, 09:14 AM

Well I called up Western Digital and they had me use the diagnostic tools. It spit out an error code and I told them what it was. They said that code means the drive is.... dead. So now it needs to be RMA'd. They were very helpful about it. Fortunately when I bought the drive a couple years back it came with a 3 year warranty, since then Western Digital has changed their warranty on their drives so now they only come with a 1 year warranty. My warranty is up in 2006. All I gotta do now is send in the old drive and then wait for them to send me a new one. My motherboard murdered my hard drive.... That board shall never fall into the hands of mankind again. It must be cast into the fires of Mordor....

navyones · 01-25-2005, 10:02 AM

I am glad that you were finally able to get some resoulution with your hard drive problem.

Western Digital will probably send you a pretty nice drive, since I am sure that they don't make your original drive anymore. You should get a good deal out of it!

SonyGuy · 01-25-2005, 12:14 PM

You think so? I figured it would just be about the same. I mean they still make an 80gb 8mb cache drive, so... same thing.

01-23-2005, 03:46 PM	#1
SonyGuy Lieutenant Commander Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: NC Posts: 903	Dead Hard drive??? Help.... Ok I got my board and processor in the mail yesterday and hooked everything up(My previous motherboard died on me so I had to get another one....). I'm using a Western Digital 80gb SE. When the board posts and reads everything out, it reads off the processor, the ram, and then sits there "Detecting IDE Devices...". After a while it finds a WD1200, but my drive is a WD800. It won't go any further than that screen. I went into the bios and had it detect the drive. It sat there for a minute, then came up with WD1200 and something like 8332mb for the capacity. I took a Seagate 4.3gb drive and hooked it up instead of using the WD drive and everything came up fine, it loaded into windows. Do I have a dead hard drive now or what? The drive was working fine before the board went down. I've just had the case sitting on it's side since my rig went down and now the hard drive suddenly doesn't want to work. Do I just need to give up and buy a new drive or what? I checked the jumpers and it's set to master. Don't know what's going on... __________________ AMD Athlon XP2100+(1.73Ghz)@XP2800+(2.25Ghz) Abit KD7 Raid 512MB PC2700 80GB WD 8mb Abit 256mb 9600XT @ Core- 575/500 Mem- 320/300 VGA Silencer and Copper RAM Sinks

01-23-2005, 04:03 PM	#2
SnowSurfer Rear Admiral Lower Half Join Date: Jun 2002 Posts: 2,616	Is it the only hd in your case? do you have it on the primary ide channel? were u wearing an antistatic bracelet when you put the new mobo in? __________________ I have an athlon xp 2500+ ... aren't you glad you know that?

01-23-2005, 04:29 PM	#7
SonyGuy Lieutenant Commander Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: NC Posts: 903	Ok so basically it is saying I need to go into the BIOS and turn translation support off by setting it to Normal? I was looking at this earlier but I don't remember what it was set on. Let me go look and see what it's set to... Alright I didn't see anything on translation support on a quick glance through. I did see this... "Access Mode" -CHS -LBA -Large -Auto It was set on Auto. Is this for translation support or do I need to look again? I don't understand where it is talking about removing the "drive overlay". If this is something that can be done from the BIOS then I'm all for it but anything other than that is not possible since I can't get the drive to boot up and is detected under a name not of it's own... Last edited by SonyGuy : 01-23-2005 at 04:35 PM.

01-23-2005, 08:52 PM	#11
zippyjuan Picture of the Day Guru Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Sunny San Diego Posts: 8,756	I had trouble with my ASUS board when I replaced a HDD. I changed the setting in Access to LBA and that did it for me. For some reason AUTO did not correctly identify my WD 80gb drive. __________________ I add new pictures to my photo gallery pretty regularly. You can see them here if you are interested: http://www.pbase.com/jeffryz

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01-23-2005, 04:06 PM	#3
navyones Captain Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Pennsylvania Posts: 1,811	I would try removing all jumpers from the hard drive, then powering it up. Let me know what it does then. I had the same problem with a new motherboard last year.

01-23-2005, 04:09 PM	#4
SonyGuy Lieutenant Commander Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: NC Posts: 903	It's the only HD I have in there. I wasn't wearing a bracelet, just grounded to the case. I'll take the jumper off the drive and try it again. Let you know in a minute...

01-23-2005, 04:17 PM	#5
SonyGuy Lieutenant Commander Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: NC Posts: 903	Ok, I took the jumper out, hooked everything up and cut it on. Same thing is happening.... I went into the bios and looked at the drive, here's what came up- WDC1200BB Capacity- 8455mb Cylinder- 16383 Head- 16 Precomp- 0 Landing Zone- 16382 Sector- 63 It's coming up as a WDC1200BB which I believe is a 120gb drive and showing an 8gb capacity, but mine is an 80gb drive. wtf??

01-23-2005, 04:25 PM	#6
navyones Captain Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Pennsylvania Posts: 1,811	I borrowed this from another forum, but it seemed to apply to your specific installation. Try troubleshooting the hard disk by looking back in the hard disk troubleshooting index and diagnosing the specific problem you are having (hard disk not recognized, won't boot, etc.) It is possible that a configuration, setup or cabling issue is what is at fault, and the disk will work properly once it is fixed. Make sure that the new hard disk is set up with the correct translation mode in the BIOS setup of the new PC. If you were using a dynamic drive overlay on your previous PC, you may have a problem when you move to a new machine that has native BIOS support, because the new system may enable translation when the overlay is expecting it to be turned off. One option is to go into the BIOS setup and turn off translation support by setting up the hard disk as "Normal" instead of "LBA", "Large" or whatever. However, this is not a great solution, since you are keeping the drive overlay when you don't have to. Instead, you should remove the drive overlay, and set up the disk with native large-disk support. If you want to be safe, then perform a full backup of the disk before transferring it to the new system. Then, detect, setup, partition and format the disk on the new system, and transfer the contents back to the disk again. This of course is not without its risks also (the backup medium could fail, so be very careful) but will ensure that the disk is being set up in the correct new environment

01-23-2005, 04:39 PM	#8
navyones Captain Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Pennsylvania Posts: 1,811	Well, since you can access the Internet; please try this link: http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/hardware/ts/ts-hdd.htm It may be easier if you can actually read the original problem and see the solution.

01-23-2005, 04:46 PM	#10
SonyGuy Lieutenant Commander Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: NC Posts: 903	Snowsurfer- I'll check.... I looked through that site and it definately makes sense about the overlays. It was saying that BIOS's are different from one another in how they access a drive and if you change motherboards it may be reading it incorrectly. That I can believe since I went from an Asus(Award BIOS) to an ABIT(Pheonix BIOS). SO maybe that is my problem right there but I am still unsure on how to correct this problem...

01-24-2005, 06:17 AM	#12
SonyGuy Lieutenant Commander Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: NC Posts: 903	I tried setting it to "Large" and to "LBA" and still nothing. What I am going to do is take the drive out, go over to my brothers house, and hook it up to his computer and format it. Then take it back over here and try it out on there again as well as clear the CMOS on my board. I am hoping that is going to clear this up. As much as I would like to buy this 160gb Seagate (8mb) drive off this guy for $80 shipped, I can't really afford it seeing as how for some reason when my previous board went down, I found myself needing not only a new board, but a new processor, video card, and an Antec 550 watt PSU Oh well....

01-25-2005, 12:06 AM	#13
ceeka Lieutenant Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: SoCal Posts: 348	Have you tried using another ide cable? I know you said the other HD worked, but try it if you have a spare.

01-25-2005, 09:14 AM	#14
SonyGuy Lieutenant Commander Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: NC Posts: 903	Well I called up Western Digital and they had me use the diagnostic tools. It spit out an error code and I told them what it was. They said that code means the drive is.... dead. So now it needs to be RMA'd. They were very helpful about it. Fortunately when I bought the drive a couple years back it came with a 3 year warranty, since then Western Digital has changed their warranty on their drives so now they only come with a 1 year warranty. My warranty is up in 2006. All I gotta do now is send in the old drive and then wait for them to send me a new one. My motherboard murdered my hard drive.... That board shall never fall into the hands of mankind again. It must be cast into the fires of Mordor....

01-25-2005, 10:02 AM	#15
navyones Captain Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Pennsylvania Posts: 1,811	I am glad that you were finally able to get some resoulution with your hard drive problem. Western Digital will probably send you a pretty nice drive, since I am sure that they don't make your original drive anymore. You should get a good deal out of it!

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01-25-2005, 12:14 PM	#16
SonyGuy Lieutenant Commander Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: NC Posts: 903	You think so? I figured it would just be about the same. I mean they still make an 80gb 8mb cache drive, so... same thing.