Member Avatar for vegeoku

OK just recently I was messing with my partitons on my harddrive and my computer messed up. Now I am trying to get my computer back to normal, but I'm having a little trouble. I rebuilt my computer, all I did was move around some of my harddrives and floppy drive, and reconnected everything. Now I have 3 harddrives, a 60, a 40, and a 30 gb. Originally I had it set up with my primary master as the 60 gb, and the 30gb was my secondary slave, and I had my secondary master as my cd rw drive.

What I decided to do was disconnect my 60 and 30 gb hdd's, and connect this new 40gb one I got form my friend. I connected it to my secondary slave, and if I get it working I will connect my others as 60-pri master , 30 -pri slave, and my cdrw drive the same, sec master. Anyways, now that I have my 40gb connected and nothing else, I'm trying to install windows on it, but first I need to format it, and I get an error.

It starts up normally, I have a Maxtor MaxBlast I think it is in my floppy drive to format my drive, but I get a system disc error. It starts normaly, and then it says 'Boot atapi cd-rom...' or something similar, and it gives me the system disc error(I think that is the error it gives me). Also when my computer starts up it doesnt detect the harddrive. It sees my cdrw drive, but not the harddrive. I'm not sure what is up with that. I don't know what kind of harddrive the 40gb is, my friend said it came with his old computer. And I'm also not sure if the jumpers are set right.

But I guess my question is - What do I do. How do I get it detected? Or is that even the problem. How do I go about formatting my drive, and installing windows on it? So yeah, thinks for any help you can give me, if you can understand what I need.

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Quick summary tied to the existing replies: has a newly-connected drive that the system will not detect at boot; rightly steered attention to BIOS autodetect, and raised jumper/cable concerns. The checklist below adds practical steps and fallbacks that were not yet covered in the thread.

Power and physical checks (fast wins)

  • With power off, reseat the drive power connector and try a different Molex from the same supply. A drive that does not spin up or clicks is likely dead or not getting 12V.
  • Swap the IDE cable for a known-good one. Cables fail often and can leave the drive invisible even though the optical drive shows.
  • Inspect the drive connector and the motherboard IDE pins for bent or broken pins. Handle the drive on an anti-static surface and unplug the PC before touching connectors.

BIOS and isolation steps

  • Boot into BIOS and confirm the IDE controller is enabled and set to autodetect. If autodetect fails, try resetting CMOS (remove the battery or use the clear-CMOS jumper briefly) and retry detection.
  • Remove all other IDE devices and connect this drive alone to a primary IDE port to eliminate master/slave or cable-select conflicts.
  • If the BIOS still does not list the drive, test the drive in another working PC or with a USB-to-IDE adapter to determine whether the drive itself is functional.

If the drive is detected

  • Use the Windows installer (or a bootable partition tool) to create a primary partition and format it; set BIOS boot order so the installer media boots first.
  • If detection works elsewhere but not on this motherboard, consider a BIOS update from the board maker or use an add-in IDE controller.

If nothing helps, the most common culprits are a dead drive, bad IDE cable, or a faulty motherboard IDE channel. The quickest diagnostic path is: (1) swap cable, (2) swap power plug, (3) test drive in another machine.

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Member Avatar for DaveSW

Is the system set to autodetect hard drives on boot, or do you have to enter the bios to tell it to autodetect?
Usually if you only have one drive you can't go too far wrong with the jumpers.

Member Avatar for Computerkev

Check the top of the drive for information on proper jumper settings.
And set the hard drive as a master to the CD-RW drive. If you are using a color coded IDE cable set the jumper to 'cs' (cable select) and connect the black end of the cable to the hard drive and the gray end to the CD-RW drive.

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