WD 80G 7200 EIDE

[djd_201]

I recently purchased ten of these drives, and all but one came through the tests with flying colors. However, something I have done is wrong I am sure.

I used the WD Lifeguard utility to write zeros to the drives, then ran the extended test to verify each drive was good. I ran the WD utility from within a Windows XP Home environment, and tested the drives set up as slaves. Now that the drives are tested and I have writtten zeros to the drives, when ever I set the pin jumper to master, and try to set them up in a new BioStar mobo computer setup I have, the computer hangs on all drives, right at the BioStar Logo screen. I have used another hard drive I have (a SeaGate 20G) and the computer recognizes the drive and goes on into POST. Do I need to do something else in order to partition and format these drives? Go back into the Windows environment with the Lifeguard utility and...?

[Midknyte]

how old is that motherboard? some boards had a 32G bios limit.

double check your jumpers. you can also try CS.

http://support.wdc.com/images/drives/jumpers/jumpers.gif

[djd_201]

Showing 2005 in the boot screen and its a n M7VIG 400 Rev 7.1 Biostar.

Curious thing...In trying to boot these, I have the WD dos boot cd in the CDrom and have the bios set to boot from the cdrom, then HDD...floppy disabled. When I switched my jumper pin on the HDD to slave and the CD to master...I can get it to boot to POST

[Midknyte]

Please look at the picture again. There are different settings for single or dual setups. if you have both your hard drive and cdrom on the same cable, then you need to use the dual jumper settings.

disconnect the cdrom and try using the hard drive in single mode to see if it works that way.

[BipolarBill]

Yup - WD drives are unique in that when they are alone on the cable, you must remove the jumper.

Honestly, its time to use cable select exclusively. Move on from master/slave and save yourself the headache.

[djd_201]

That was the trick on the hard drive as a master....removing the jumper cmpletely instead of placing it on the master position...I see now the difference if it is alone on the cable...but will migrate over to cable select...thanks for the tips

[djd_201]

hmmmmmm...in trying to set up these drives to install Windows XP on that Biostar M7VIG 400 motherboard, I've run across a perplex situation. I can't use cable select to set up a non-partioned, unformated drive. Any suggestions as to why?

[BipolarBill]

You don't have to format before setting up Windows. The option will be there when you do. You have to "create" the partition during setup. Read the screen.

You can prep the drives on any Windows system if you want. Use Disk Management to create partitions and format. Just don't assign a letter to the drives.

[djd_201]

It might be particular just to this Biostar mATX but what I have ran into, on three different drives...trying to find a clean install...is that during the install of Windows XP Home...it tells me it cannot find a file out of the D: (CD drive) i386 file...and it won't show the D: CDROM drive containing the XP Home Disk...although it recognized it on the start of the install. I've had to shut down the computer all three times in trying to find out if I was somehow messing up....switch the drives from cable select over to pin jumper 'master' 'slave' setting...then reboot to catch up on the install...and it then recognizes the drives and finishes the install....heck of an experience that has a dummy like me....dumbfounded. I almost am sorta kinda sure I will never run into it maybe on another mother board. smiling

appreciate the ear