bios can't see hard drive ?

[litehouse]

I just put a new system together(my first try). When I try to auto detect my hard drive in bios nothing seems to happen. Should there be some numbers in "standard cmos setup" that identify my hard drive such as number of heads, cylinders, sectors? When I first tried to run Fdisk got message "no fixed disk installed". Not sure how I did it but finally got fdisk to take and windows can now see my hard drive!? Still does not appear in cmos setup. Now system boots to windows but is in Dos compatibility mode! I get message in system properties that "drive c is using ms-dos compatibility mode file system". Any ideas? System so far is Abit BE6 mobo, Western Digital Expert 18gig 7200 rpm ata\66 HDD, 128 mb ram, Diamond v770 ultra video,40x CD rom. I have HDD set up in ata\66 primary controller set as single drive with cd rom in \33 primary as single drive. I have checked and triple checked all connections. Thanks for any input.

[JW310]

litehouse,
Have you tried disabling ata\66 on the hard drive (there should be a jumper that will let you do that)?

Also, if you can set the number of heads, cylinders, etc. manually, the numbers you should use are on the WD website (http://www.westerndigital.com/service/FAQ/xpertspecs.html#ac418000) (hopefully this is the right page for your drive)

If that doesn't work, look through the BIOS settings and see if you can find any options that let you enable/disable ata\66. I have the BH6, but I'm not familiar with the BE6.

Hope this helps you any!

~john~ JW310

[litehouse]

I can't seem to find a way to switch to \33 on the hard drive or in bios. Only way is to hook up to \33 controller, I think. I will try putting Numbers in manually when I get home from work.
Thanks for the advice JW310!

[Vampiel]

Also make sure that your slave/master jumper settings are correct, your boot HD preferably should be master on IDE 1. That way you can setup all the other devices without having to worry about it trying to boot up off of them (there's an explanation for this but just put it on IDE 1 set as master for your boot drive to make things easier). Make sure that no 2 things are set as the same thing on the same IDE cable, and try to stay away from cable select.

[Dillbert2000]

Does your mother board support udma\66 HHD? If not you will need a controller card unless the HDD can be set to udma \33. Some must be run at the udma\66 settings. Good luck.

[litehouse]

Yes, the Abit BE6 is an ata/66 board. It has four controllers, 2 /33's and 2 /66's. I had problems with modem config but am on line now. As far as I can see my cmos still has no idea what my hard drive is but have system up and running (very well) for 2 or 3 days now. Don't know if I should mess with it any more. I just hope it doesn't cause trouble later on. The reason I was in dos compatability mode was that I hadn't loaded the proper drivers for the ata/66 controllers.
Thanks for the help!