Bios won't recognise drives

[nay77]

Hi,
I recently got a second hand 20gb hard drive for my computer (I only had a 6gb as primary and a 1.3gb as slave) and I took both the drives out to put the other one in to format it, and bios wouldn't recognise it. (I have put my nephew's 20gb hd in b4 2 format it for him and bios recognised it) so I then put my other two hard drives in again and bios wouldn't recognise either one of them or the floppy and cdrom. It kept coming up with floppy fail and that error message saying to insert boot disk. I swapped cables around and stuff but still no go. I found that it will only run my 6gb hard drive (which i have the o/s on - win98) if the 1.3gb hard drive isn't connected (then it won't recognise any at all again), and the cdrom cable is connected but it will not recognise that there is a cdrom at all, only the hard drive is detected. I also tried putting just my sister's hard drive in (20gb with winME) but it would not recognise it either. Any ideas? Could the 2nd hand hd I put in have damaged bios in any way (like a virus or something)? Thanks

 

[nay77]

ps

oh yeah my computer is 1.3ghz, and I loaded winxp onto my nephew's hd when i formatted it, so i know it can run all windows platforms and drives up to 20gb (haven't tried higher) without the need for partitioning.

 

[patio]

It's possible the BIOS is dizzy after all these changes...just kidding.
First make sure the IDE cable has not become un-seated at the MBoard end.
If it will boot to the 6G do that 2 or 3 times with no other drives connected.
Then you want to re-introduce one drive at a time. The 6G should be jumpered to master and hooked to the end if the cable on IDE1.
Next try the 20G. Set the jumper to slave, and connect it to the middle connector on IDE1.
Re-boot and enter the BIOS. There should be a setting to auto-detect IDE devices...select this option and let it run. It might take a minute or so.After it runs select F10 to save the info to the BIOS and then re-boot.
Repeat this with each drive...i would next put in the CD drive as master on IDE2, then after that is successful than your other HDD as slave on the middle connector of IDE2.

Good Luck, and let us know...

patio.