20gb WD drive runs as slave only, will not boot, no DOS recognition

[denodave]

Hard drive will not boot, is not recognized in DOS (hence cannot fdisk, etc.), but is recognized by BIOS and manufacturer configuration software. In fact, WD's EZ-Drive program actually verifies the drive's mechanicals and logical structure, AND says it has installed an overlay and formatted the thing (and actually did). BUT when I did this it gave a strange message to the effect that the jumpers may be causing the machine to see it as smaller than it is. (There was no jumper as it is supposed to be a single drive) The EZ-Drive software will only set it up as a 2.1gb drive. But again it will not boot.

## The kicker is that I can install it as a slave on a different machine and access all the files under Windows, no problem. So the software analysis is correct, mostly. I have installed it in another box as slave under Win2000 and have repartitioned it to correct size and formatted it as FAT32 through Win2K disk management. Works perfect (as slave)! ##

The other variable is that the machine's bios (below) will only allow the primary IDE to recognize a slave drive BUT will boot windows from there (the secondary IDE has the CDR set on cable select). NO NEED to remind me about new cables, jumpers, CMOS, removing pci cards, etc. -- already dunnit all.

Anybody know if the boot sector/track can be "burnt out" (fried, wasted, history) and the disk still usable as a slave? If so, why?

Hard drive in question is Western Digital 20gb, machine has Asus CUSI-m board, 52x CDR, P4-900mhz, bios update is most current.

Any opinions on this subject are welcome!! (I may cross-post this in other forums)

[BipolarBill]

WD drives must have the jumper removed when alone on the cable. Look at the diagram.

[AllGamer]

Set your CDRW to Master and HDD to Slave

if that's the case

then FDISK and create a new partition
then make sure you make the partition ACTIVE, then after you run a FORMAT /S

it'll become bootable

:t

[denodave]

Thank you, but...

As I said there is no need to remind me of jumpers, already tried everything according to the book.

FDISK will NOT work under any cabling situation because the drive is NOT registering under DOS, only able to see it in windows!

"Anybody know if the boot sector/track can be "burnt out" (fried, wasted, history) and the disk still usable as a slave? If so, why?"

[NDD]

Try to format it with Partition Magic 8 in the computer it worked in.
Otherwise try Low Level Format in BIOS, and remove the EZ-BIOS thingy.