Hard Drive issue?

Question

I have been asked to look at my nieces PC she got for christmas
When you first turn it on the opening screen show the hard drive set as primary master but when i run windows xp setup it says there is no hard drive why is this. I took the hard drive out and put it into my pc and it run fine i formatted it and gave it a label no problems so it is not broken

Motherboard KM266 pro
Hard Drive maxtor fireball 3

Answer 1

Could be you've used the wrong bus - you may have used a cd rom drive connection, or not set it as a primary drive

Answer 2

Try installing the harddrive as cable-select. Be sure you are using the appropriate cable and have set the jumpers to the correct configuration.

Also, be sure to reset the motherboard bios settings. This can be done by either a jumper on the motherboard, or just simply taking out the motherboard battery and reseating.

Then have bios do an auto search for the harddrive/s. If still no drives appear, double-check your hardware configuration.

Answer 3

I had this happen with a new HP pc. I pulled the ribbon cable from the motherboard and hard drive and reinstalled it. All was fine. This is not an uncommon problem with pc's as they come from the factory.

Answer 4

Is the hard drive a SATA drive? (thin black cable+small connector) or an IDE or PATA drive? (flat thick grey cable+ 40 hole wide connector)

If its a SATA you might need some drivers for XP setup (look at bottom of screen during XP setup where it asks about storing 3rd party mass storage driver)

Answer 5

- while in the bios, "autodetect the drives" and other hardware then "save" the settings, then let it reboot

- some computers will only take the software that came with the hardware i.e. Toshiba Sattelite

- some computers or harddrives need "extra software' to be loaded first, "before loading windows"

Answer 6

Make sure the jumper(the little pin at the back) is either removed or on the pins nearest the IDE ribbon(depending on whether the HD is a slave or single unit) , not nearest the power lead (covering these will limit the capacity). Also, check in your BIOS (you might in fact have been sold a 140GB not a 250GB !)

Answer 7

I can give you a link that deals with hard drive problems.
Some drive problems can be easily fixed by yourself using easily available tools. I found the info at http://fixit.in useful. Try this site, if you can get what is required

Answer 8

Check the jumpers ! on the hd of course .............setup'z in bios set correctly ?

if everything there is set ok just get back with me