pigglesworth
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Today I built a new pc. The specs = P4 3ghz, 1024mb DDR ram (dual channel), Pci-E X800GT & a Gigabyte 8I915P Duo motherboard. I retained my 120gb & 40gb PATA Seagate Barracuda hard drives from my previous system and also retained my old cd-writer & dvd-rom. The system is set up nicely and everything appears to work except the bios doesn't recognise the hard drives when plugged into the green Ultra ATA parrallel plugs IEDE2/IEDE3 (better demonstrated here: http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Products/Products_GA-8I915P Duo (Rev%201.x).htm . In the bios the hard disks are not recognised when i attempt to detect them in the CMOS settings, only the cd-rom drives. The hard drives only appear (with device names) in the hard disk boot prioriy section. It seems the BIOS is recognising them as devices but is anable to access them. When I attempt to install Windows XP, setup fails because Quote: "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your system". When I attempt to boot the cd that came with the motherboard (which is bootable, it runs some backup utillity) it also claims that no hard disks are installed. Obviously I have spent hours changing every possible configuration with PATA cables, swapping the master & slave, using a different brand new 80gb hard drive, every bios option i can think of, disabling raid & SATA, etc. and nothing works. When I plug the hard drives into the red IEDE1 plug designed for the cd-roms and plug cd-roms into the green IEDE2/IEDE3 plugs the opposite occurs in the bios: the drives are recognised and information about them is displayed (such as sectors etc.) and the cd-roms are nowhere to be found. In this configuration Windows boots (as it is still installed on the 120gb from my last pc) and understandabely fails with a blue error screen, and the the system won't boot from cd with the 120gb installed. Strangely when I attempt to install Windows with only the 40gb plugged in I arrive at a similar blue error screen just before I am prompted to clean install or repair and existing installation. When trying the backup utility disk that comes with the motherboard it runs successfully and backs up several gb of useless data on the 40gb so it is able to recognise the hard drive when in this configuration. This is extremely annoying as this one problem is stopping me from using my nice new pc. A big post I know but it would be great to hear anybody's ideas on how to fix this damned problem. Urgently. Thanks