Reloading OS (Issues... Suggestions? MBR??)

[PC eye]

First the difference in batteries between laptops and desktops in reference there is the board in a laptop should also see a small Lithium battery. The larger Lithium you recharge is the main power source while the cmos information stored on the bios eprom is maintained by the small battery there. The most commonly used battery is the CR2032 3v battery that replaces the 2032C and the LF1/2V as well. You should take it with you to any place where watch and pocket calculators are sold for matching it up.

With the Seagate at the end of the primary ide cable set as master you may have to set the WD drive to cable select on the middle connector. Try that either as slave or CS there to see which will work. If you are only trying to boot from the Seagate the need for two listing of hard drive in the bios boot order isn't necessary. The bios will automatically go to the first drive type set. On some boards you can bring the list of hard drives installed and simply one to the top of the list to be set as default once you save and exit the bios.

 

[LauraKoz]

Be back in a few to let you know how that went

 

[LauraKoz]

With the Seagate at the end of the primary ide cable set as master you may have to set the WD drive to cable select on the middle connector. Try that either as slave or CS there to see which will work.

100% on target!
It took the Seagate set as master and the slave set with the cable select for it to show up in BIOS. Now, both show up where they should (e.g. primary master, primary slave), but when you go to the boot tab. There is only one IDE (always been that way) and it's set to the Seagate. So does that mean I need to reload the drivers for the WD drive?

 

[PC eye]

What that means is the bios is set to load from the Seagate drive. But at least you know the drive is working as it should. With WD drives you often have to set the second drive to cable select. This is seen more on boards made prior to the AMD 939 models and several earlier Intel models as well.

On the Asus board here you would go into the boot devices section and highlight "hard drives" and press the enter key. That will open up a screen showing the hard drives installed as well as "cardbus". On other makes you would have to look in the P'n'P/peripherals section or where the boot order is found to see if there's an option to choose between drives. You then move the WD by using the "+" plus or "-" minus keys found on the numpad to bring that to the top of the list then press F10 or choose the save+exit option to save the change made as you leave the bios.

The WD would then be the default boot device. The option to bring up a boot menu if the board has that is seen at post time. An assigned key will be named there next to the one set for entering the bios. When that is brought up you can select between floppy dirve at top, hard drives, or optical(cd//dvd) at the bottom. If that is there you never have to go into the bios to simply boot from any drive. A trip into the bios would only be needed to reassign the default drive.

 

[LauraKoz]

Yes, I'm familiar with that area of BIOS but perhaps I'm missing something in your post... as I said, I can see the WD drive, but 'My Computer' doesn't recognize it. Didn't know if that pointed to a driver issue (though after scanning WD's site, it seems they don't offer many driver downloads and refer you to your motherboard manufacturer) or something else...

 

[PC eye]

Windows has it's own drivers for ide controllers. For a sata drive you would either get those from the cd that comes with the board or download directly from the board manufacturer's own support site. Seagate and WD alike have their own hard drive utilities for ready download. WD has their own Data Lifeguard utilities found at http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1

For Seagate you would go to http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=51e092db8a13d010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

 

[StrangleHold]

as I said, I can see the WD drive, but 'My Computer' doesn't recognize it.

Does that mean that the bios sees the drive but when windows boots its not in my computer, if so the drive has to be partitioned to show up in windows.

 

[PC eye]

If the drive has already been partitioned and formatted and still not seen in MyComputer or when opening Windows Explorer(tied together) Windows hasn't installed it yet. That's when you have to go into the device manager and open the "disk drives" section there and right click that specific drive. You then choose the uninstall option and restart the system. Windows will then prompt that a new hardware has been found in a popup message seen on the taskbar. Simply right click on the hardware icon and have Windows auto install it for you. Windows will then load it's own drivers.