bios wont see HD (#2)

[Rookie]

I'm a novice and dont know which of two things I changed to make the bios refuse to see hard drives.
My system: pent133, 32m edo, biostar 8500 tac, ami bios date 10/94
A: selected possibly wrong secondary ide controller in attmept to put second hd and retain cd rom+master hd on primary slot
B: got overconfident and hit the *optimum* button- which seems to have changed several settings in advanced and chipset areas. Foolish of me to not write down ALL settings...so I could restore them.
Am reaching internet w/ 486DX33, 8m ram. Swapped this known good hd and the pent refused to see it as well. removed all cards except video & floppy- known hd set as master, entered settings for user cyl,hd,sectors correctly.
Dont know what else to do, please help
David Bruce Jr

[MadMax]

Go back to your original sys.

Take out the new hdd, put back your old hdd.
Set all pages in bios to "default".
Set your primary hdd to autodetect.

Make sure that your hdd parameter jumpers are set correctly. Single drive, no slave.

It should boot.

[Rookie]

Did all that, no dice, went a step further: removed modem, sound blaster, cd rom, even floppy- everything except the S3 video card ( need that to see the post screen) left in ps2 mouse (no serial) and keyboard. No luck.
Does chernoyble do this? I do get a post, it says hdd fail, even with the good drive we're talking on right now, so its not detecting anything...
David

[MadMax]

Yes, it could be a virus. Break out the bootable av floppy and scan that puppy. Boot sector virus maybe....

[Ed_S]

Noticed the date of bios - what HD is this? it could have been set up using drive overlay which allowed larger HD on older bios which couldn't access them normally. These programs required you to set the bios differently than the drive's standard settings and auto-detect will not find this properly.