Installing new HDD - entire PC failed to setup

I'm on XP2000 home, Samsung HDD 36GB. worked perfectly
Installed new Liteon DVD drive 3 months back; worked perfectly right up tp Christmas Day.

Christmas day
- Bought new Hitachi Deckstar 3.5, 160GB for the kids as Christmas present.
- Attempted to install it as slave to Samsung.
- Followed Hitachi manual instructions, including configuring jumpers correctly as per the instruction manuals, while leaving Samsung HDD at original jumper settings
- inserted installation CD.

Now:-
(1) PC loads up, completes memory check (OK), which suggests the motherboard has not been blown, BUT
(2) PC stalls at "DETECTING IDE DRIVES....".
(3) There now appears to be no power running thru the DVD drive (although 4-pin power connections are all connected) and I cannot open it to extract the installation CD without breaching the warranty. Therefore cannot install and use reboot disk.
(4) Disconnected new Hitachi Deckstar and returned PC to original setup.....
(5) Still the PC loads up , completes memory check (OK), but stalls at "DETECTING IDE DRIVES...."

PC is Time Computers, in receivership, so I have no support to phone up. Am now using borrowed PC tower to access internet. Now the kids have no Christmas present from me!

CAN ANYBODY HELP PLEASE!

Jon DeMassey
jondemassey@ntlworld.com or in the Majorgeeks forum.

 

Are all IDE cable firmly connected at both ends? Have you made sure that all the drives are on the right IDE cable?

 

Ok here's a checklist of things to look at:

In your BIOS, do you have any HDDs listed? Which HDD is listed as first boot device?

When installing your new HDD, did you put it on the middle or end connector on the IDE cable? If it's a slave it must be on the middle connector, not the one furthest from the motherboard. Are you sure it is set as a slave? Are you sure the current HDD is set as master?

Is the new HDD formatted? If it's not formatted I suggest using a boot CD with partition magic to format it.

Have you tried using a paper clip to open the DVD drive? Extend the paper clip so it is straight, then push it into the small hole on the front of the drive.

 

If you unplug the cables from the new drive does it boot up or does it still hang at detecting drives?

 

jondemassey has already said that the same problem still occurs

 

Thanx Prophet

We cannot format anything because the set-up stalls at "detecting IDE drives".

We opened the DVD with the paperclip (cool) but still cannot boot from it because the DVD had stopped working along with everything else (I forgot that) except the Motherboard as far as detecting IDE drives

The drive boot order is the only thing we can access from the setup BUT only when we disconnect the NEW Hitachi HDD. It was DVD - Floppy - HD. We tried setting up with the order changed to HDD - Floppy - DVD. It made no difference.

The IDE cabling is correct! Although the Hitachi told us master is A-B, G-H and slave is A-B, C-D, the original hard disk, Samsung, specified its own particular master-drive jump as A-C, G-H and was already configured that way. So we left the Samsung as it is and configured the Hitachi (correctly) A-B, C-D. If we try anything else I believe it will screw up the BIOB settings, right?

Any other ideas please?

Jon DeMassey

 

Doh, I should try reading the whole post before replying.

Try resetting the CMOS. Some motherboards have a jumper pin that you just connect the two leads together. But, the sure way to do it is to unplug the computer from the wall and remove the battery for 30 seconds. Try this and see if it changes anything. (Leave the new drive unplugged for now. Both the power and IDE cables)

 

Hi Watt

Sorry for appearing a Luddite... but I am!

How do we remove the battery please? We can't quite se!

Jon DeMassey

 

Actually, Wyatt, we took a guess and have removed the battery. This should be interesting. Will report back as soon as possible with results. Fanx4now

Jon DeMassey

 

Yeh it's fairly easy to stop.. It's just a large watch type battery. Remove it and leave it out for around 30 secs

 

Aaaaaaargh!

Even after removing & replacing battery the setup still stops at "detecting IDE drives"

Interesting! The successful memory check revealed just over 1GB; that's the RAM only, so the motherboard can only detect its own memory, not the HDDs.

What now?

 

Thanx2 every1

I swapped around the cables from the DVD drive to the HDDs. It worked

I don't know how because we NEVER disconnected the DVD cable thru all the new HDD installation so it could not have been connected to the wrong one! Yet somehow the IDE connections semed to swap over. It is as if the BIOS reset itself to a new config!

Now I have anopther query thread entitled "Can I convert FAT32 to NTFS without backing up"