dear friends,
my pc pentium 200mhz with 32 mb ram does not detect new 40gb hard drive. what should i do? Please advise appropriate solution.
regards,
omar

Make sure the IDE cables are all the way(and not upside down) in and power supply cables are connected in snugg.

That's a pretty old-school machine. It might require a BIOS update to be able to detect such a large drive. (Remember, when that computer was designed hard drives ran about 500megs to 2 gigs in size).

Check with the motherboard manufacturer and see if you can flash your bios.

DOWNLOAD AIDA32 HERE
GET AIDA32 it will tell you the exact name/model/brand.ect...of your MOTHERBOARD and every bit of hardware hooked up to it.
If you cant find the drivers for your board post back and we(TechTalkCommunity) will get them.

My pc pentium 200mhz with 32 mb ram does not detect new 40gb hard drive. what should i do? Please advise appropriate solution.

Your BIOS does not support drives above 32 GB, possibly even an 8 GB limit (less likely). It likely will not recognize such large drives in their default configuration, even if you use utilities that work for that purpose.

Go to the website of the drive manufacturer and download the drive utility package (MaxBlast for Maxtor, for example). Part of these packages is something usually called EZ-Drive (or similar) which wedges an interrupt to allow large-drive access. The problem is that older BIOSes don't expose this int13h interrupt, so it can't be "hooked".

A Promise or HighPoint (for example) add-in IDE controller would solve this, but would likely cost as much as a used, faster computer...

For this reason, nearly all 40 GB drives can be "strapped" with a jumper to a 32 GB limit (the manufacturer's site has diagrams, if the drive doesn't) so they can be used on those machines that absolutely will not work with larger drives; I've done this and it's better than nothing!

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.