BIOS won't recognize hard drive

[gitarwmn]

I am putting a system together and the BIOS will not recognize the hard drive. I know the drive works as well as the controller. I have triple checked cables and connections and everything is fine. I even tried a different drive and still nothing. All the settings are correct in and autodetect doesn't detect it. the board is a PC 100 M571 with AMI BIOS if that helps. If anyone can help me I would be eternally gratefull.
Thanks.

[fishboy]

did the bios detect the other drive? I had the same problem this weekend. Put another drive in and it came up fine. Could not even low level format it using utility from Maxtor. Maxtor is sending me a new drive.

[toms111]

Check cable and jumpers very carfully. I don't know about everybody else but I can't tell you how many times I was sure that the board or the drive had to be bad, only to later discover a stupid mistake with the jumpers. Or that the cable had come out of the socket jut a little. I have also run in to quite a few defective IDE cables.

[gitarwmn]

I checked the jumpers too and nothing still. This one really has me stumped.

[toms111]

Try removing all other devices except vidio card. Try another vidio card if you have one. I have seen bad cards of many types prevent HD recogition. Does this board have a reset jumper? Try it. Does the floppy drive work? If it does try flasing the bios. If you are sure the drive and cable works on another system, and this board will not recognize any drive, it may be a bad board.

[gitarwmn]

Thanks I'll try that. Can't I just remove the cmos battery to reset everything or should I try flashing it first?

[Bazango]

Some BIOSs will not detect all drives. Recognition is not based on analysis, I think, but rather by type. You might have to collect the information that the BIOS shows for the drive yourself and key it into those fields yourself. Sometimes the information is actually on the back of the drive itself. Sometimes the manufacturer's website has a location where this kind of information is listed.

When in BIOS and in that part that deals with the HDs, toggle the "type" field until you find "user defined" or something like it. In the BIOSs I've seen it is number 47. Then key in your hard drive data.

Also note that the size that the BIOS assigns the drive is not EXACTLY like your drive's specifications, but it should be pretty close (a little less). If not, then one of the fields you put in is wrong.

[CodeSilver]

BIOS won't recognize my HDD either. I think that the Hard drive settings are messed up. Please help me.

[MadMax]

CodeSilver~Post your own topic and you'll probably get a responce right away. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[MR COMPUTER]

I haven't found a drive yet that the M571 would not auto detect.Recheck your bios settings.Set to auto detect. Make sure your primary controller is "turned on" in the bios.Jumpers may be set wrong on the hard drive or the cdrom. Make the hard drive the only item on the controller and see if it detects.On the board,The bottom cable plugin is IDE 1. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif

[kwai]

a friend's hd would only be recognized if it was jumpered in cable select (CS) mode despite it using a standard ide cable.

worth a try at least.