WD 20gig won't load on Athlon board - HELP -

[MattV]

Hi guys, I'm rather new to this forum. I was wondering if anyone has experienced this problem that I'm experiencing right now.
I have an MSI Slot A Motherboard # 6167 using An Athlon 500 processor. The hard drive I want to use is a Western Digital 20 gigabyte EIDE Caviar hard drive which supports ATA 66 UDMA 66. When I set the system up with the hard drive, BIOS detects it, however the system will give me a blank screen with a cursor (indefinatly) when the system tries to boot with the hard drive in. Is there something that I am missing? I have tried everything so far, I've downloaded the newest bios for the system, I've tried multiple jumper settings, I've booted up a Samsung 8.4 gig hard drive and it loads up fine. I've attempted to put the WD on slave settings behind the samsung, but the system still hangs. The thing that irritates me is that the system will totally hang whenever the IDE cable is connected to the hard drive! I am using the correct cable, it supports ATA 66 , so where am I going wrong? I am going to call MSI, but its' the weekend, and nobody's there. thanx a bunch. Matt

[Susan]

Couple of things...

You probably do but I have to ask, are you sure you have the jumpers set correctly on the HD? Also, did you try a different cable with that drive? (Maybe the cable is bad) You can use a non ATA66 cable to see if the drive gets recognized that way.

One more thing you could try is booting to a floppy and run FDISK to see if it is recognized that way.

[MattV]

well, after a long time of getting mad and using bad words on the computer, I put in the WD EZ drive utilities. THe diagnostics stamped the drive with a return error number, and it's on its way to RMA heaven. Thx everyone =)