Motherboard won't recognise hard drives properly

[pigglesworth]

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

 

[Ste]

Link don't work.

Put the Harddrive as Master and the CD-Rom as slave on the Same IDE channel, raguardles of what the board says or is designed for. Then try it.

 

[pigglesworth]

Put the Harddrive as Master and the CD-Rom as slave on the Same IDE channel, raguardles of what the board says or is designed for. Then try it.


Yeah I just thpught of that also. I will try it now.

BTW you gotta include the (Rev%201.x).htm on the end of the link.

 

[Juice Daddy]

btw, link still didn't work with that end part...htm

a while back, my friend got a motherboard... we put his old hard drive in, and it wouldn't work...(that was in the primary ide)

so we tried it in the secondary ide, and it worked...

so we came to the conclusion that the primary ide was defective (to bad the warrenty had expired before he could return it...)

as for when you got windows to... start... I had a similar problem with a blue screen error, it was because I had installed windows on a different computer, then pluged that hard drive into the other pc..., all I had to do to fix that was a windows repair...

it had something to do with the bios and the partition not matching up... If I can find that post, I'll make a link,,,

 

[Ste]

I probably replied to it, but hes not even getting the HD and CD rom to be reconized once he does we can go from there. But I think he wants to reformat and reinstall, if Im reading his post correctly.

 

[Juice Daddy]

http://techist.com/showthread.php?threadid=77616&highlight=intel+amd

yep

 

[pigglesworth]

Yeah I need to reformat, don't care about the old installation. I tried putting cd-rom & hdd on the same channel and it would not recognise the cd-rom at all in any way but still recognised the hdd as usuall. I also tried having both hdd and the cd-roms on the IEDE2/IEDE3 plugs and i got the same windows blue screen. It seems windows won't install off a cd-rom that isn't on the first IDE channel. I've also tried installing Fedora with the cd-roms in the EIDE2 but it says some crap about no supported driver for the cd-rom drive. The problem is that anything not plugged into the first ide channel isn't being recognised in the CMOS settings section of the BIOS.

 

[Ste]

Try CD Rom as master on first IDE Channel and HD as master on Second IDE channel, screw around with that. Keep changing it till it works. If not call Gigabyte tech support.

 

[pigglesworth]

Well nothing has seemed to work and I have recieved no response from Gigabyte. I'm going to bring the board back to the place I bought it and exchange it, hopefully that will fix it.

 

[flyboychuckles]

pigglesworth,

Do you have any other options in your BIOS for IDE channel settings. I know on my MSI mobo when I was trying to install my 2 SATA HDDswith 1 PATA HDD and two CD drives I had to set up the IDE channels to work just right. My bios would recognize the HDDs but not the cdroms until I dug up the mobo manual and set the channels up exactly as they said. All I know is that it was a pain and involved a lot of cursing. If it's not that then like others say, it may be the ide1 channel is bad.