Not detecting Drives on boot up

S

Southy

New Member
I have this computer that I just got (used) and it didnt come with a hard drive, thats fine cause I have some extras, anyways, I put one in and I go to boot it up, the computer does the memory check and stuff then says: Suggested SDRAM CAS Lagency Time is "3" ..... I checked the BIOS and it was set to AUTO, so I changed it to '3' and it stilll seems to do it, none the less thats not the problem, I just thought I would mention that.

Anyways I set in the BIOS to Auto detect the IDE primary/secondary master/slave drives on boot up, but everytime I start the computer up, on the next line after it prints that "Suggested SDRAM CAS Lagency Time is "3" it says "Detecting IDE primary master, (press F4 to skip)" which it is suppose to do but then it never finds anything, it just sits there and after a few seconds if you try to hit F4 it doesnt do anything, almost like it locked up. If you push the F4 button right away, it skips and then trys to boot up but fails because no hard drive is found.

I have tried playin with the jumper settings on the hard drive and single CD ROM drive, even tried unplugging the cd rom altogether but to no avail. Also both hard drive and cd rom are running off the same IDE cable. Any ideas?
 
Try to put the Hard drive on it's own bus, that is most likely the problem.

Sometimes the way you have it set up will work, but sometimes not. :)
 
Re:

Hello,

What motherboard do you have...and what size is you Hard Drive? Some motherboards only support certain Hard Drive capacities... because of the motherboard's BIOS support.

If your Hard Drive has a jumper setting to lower its capacity (for example: 80GB to 5GB ...), try setting it. Although doing so may no be so good in the long run, at least it aids process of elimination.
 
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Which BIOS do you have. I used to have the same problem on an older K7 board I had. It turned out it was just tempramental with detecting drives. If you give a little more info people might be able to help a little more.
 
Suggested SDRAM CAS Lagency Time is "3" ..... I checked the BIOS and it was set to AUTO, so I changed it to '3' and it stilll seems to do it
Click to expand...
do what?

Make sure you dont have a master/slave collision :)
 
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