ohgrbyte

Hi. I have a bit of an odd problem right now with a computer I am going to use for Linux soon. So here goes.

I just recieved an old PC with a PIII 500 Mhz CPU, 256MB RAM (adding more soon), and a nice Nvida card to boot yesterday.

I attached two 40 Gig harddrives, one for the OS, one for games, music, etc.

But the BIOS refused to see the two harddrives. It just refused to see either of them.

Then I discovered two extra IDE connectors. There are four total on the board, two white, two black. I attached the harddrive to one of the white ones.. and Whah LA! It worked... however. The BIOS still does not see the harddrives... During boot up though it does seem it, as a Secondary Master using something I'm not familar with called "HPP or HTP something or other.."I'll have to look it up again when I reboot to the computer. But it's something I've never seen before. Ultra DMA 66 too.. That's new to me.

The drives also only show up as 37.5 GIG Drives and not 40 GIG like they should be.

I was wondering if anyone knows what the problem could be and if there is a fix for this.

Thankyou

mark3567

Hi,

We probably need some more details. Provide motherboard brand and model, the brand names and types of ALL the drives you intend to use and other pertinent information that might help us.

As a temperary possible solution, I would guess you have cable or jumper problems. Be sure that you have the following:

First of all, have an 80 connector cable for the hard drives and not an old 40 connector cable.

Second, make sure you use the first white connector for the hard drives.

Second, set the jumpers and select cable settings as follows:

Motherboard.......................Slave Drive..................Master Drive
Jumpers set at....................Slave..........................Master
Cable Position.....................Middle of cable.............End of cable
Color Blue.....(ribbon conn)...Gray..........................Black

Third, make sure your BIOS has Auto set for hard drive detection.

When this is set up, give it a try.

Also, if you have a CDRom, put it on the other white IDE slot, set the jumpers to the master position, on the end of the cable (and the 40 connector cable should work on all except the very newest drives that have special connections)

dai

look on the m/b alongside the eide slot for eide1 and use that
check that the drive on the end plug is set to master and the one on the middle plug is set to slave
set the bios to auto detect the drives
you will never see the full amount of the drives 37.5 is normal
mark you type faster than me

crazijoe

Since you mentioned that the MB had 4 IDE channels, I would have to assume the you have an additional controller on it. The southbridge chipset will only support 2 IDE channels. It also sounds as if you installed the hard drives to the secondary controller and that is why they do not show in the BIOS. They would be seen in the controllers BIOS that would post after the motherboard BIOS.