Hard drive not reconised

[goofa6641]

My friend has just got given a pc which wasn't working would'nt boot up, it was'nt reconising the hard disk, tryied the hdd in his other machine as a secondary drive it was ok so i formatted it,
put it back in the other machine still no joy the hdd seems to be to big for the bios to reconise, so i was looking arround for an upgrade for the bios, had loads of bother getting it,
the motherboard is i believe a M520 from PC CHIPS, i successfully upgraded it,
the most recent i could get was 97, but the drive is still is not reconised as the primary master , but if i disable the primary master and set the drive as primary slave it will boot no problem,
but i am left with only two other IDE connections secondary master and slave, can anyone tell me why my drive is not reconised in primary master.
thanx in advance.

[Azza]

The pins you connect the jumper to on the hard drive may be dodgy. If it is not the pins it could be the hdd's printed circuit board.

[goofa6641]

So there is no reason why the secondary master is detecting the drive and the primary master would'nt, it must be the drive then.

[goofa6641]

I have just thought of something, it couldnt be because i had that drive on my machine when i loaded windows on and i had it in the primary master then because i directly replaced mine so i must have had the jumper on master.

[Imperion1]

Did you use the same ide ribbon cable when you tried the hard drive on the Primary and Secondary connectors?

Here's some ideas:
Check system bios, set drives to autodetect for Primary connector.
Try a different ribbon cable.
Check the Primary IDE connector on the motherboard for bent pins.

[Imperion1]

Thread moved.