Pentium 3 computer, hard drive not working

[farmer2009]

Hi guys.

I am having abit of an issue. I have an old system that worked fine when I had it along time ago, I upgraded and it went in storage and wasn't being used. It needed a hard drive, so today I bought a Western Digital 160GB IDE drive for it. When I first booted up the computer, it did not find a hard drive in place. I reset it and the next boot found the hard drive, so I put the XP cd in the CD drive and it loaded and booted off the CD, it didn't get very far in the windows installation when it then told me it couldn't find a hard drive installed on my computer. Every second time I load the system it cannot find the drive, and it never lets me install windows. Can anyone help me ? I am trying to give this computer to a family that doesn't have much but its not working out just right for me.

 

[patonb]

It might be the cable..... Make sure your drive is set as master, and the cable is in good.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

Make sure the cable is firmly inserted into both the drive and the motherboard. Also check the power cable. You should be able to hear and feel the drive spinning up when you turn on the PC. Check the BIOS (usually press F1 or Delete while turning on the PC) to make sure it detects the hard drive and is set to boot from it. If it doesn't find it, get a different IDE cable (if you're using the new one that came with the drive, it should be fine). It may also be a motherboard issue. Older boards were not designed for drives greater than somewhere around 128GB. It may have problems trying to read and write to a large drive like your 160GB. You can try partitioning it into two partitions both < 120GB (use a partition editor, either GParted on a Linux CD or one of the partition editors on Hiren's Boot CD). That may fix addressing issues if it detects two different partitions instead of one big one.

 

[farmer2009]

I'm at my wits end with this thing. Still no luck and I have tried everything , I'm thinking the motherboard is too big for the particular drive, and it just won't let it work. I don't know if I can get around this or not.

 

[Lexluethar]

Do as calc suggested and use a 3rd party partitioning tool like Gpart

 

[KurrentEweser]

Your bios and/or motherboard may be too old to be used with XP. What's your motherboard model and bios version?

 

[advancedgeek]

I believe there used to be a 137GB limit so i think the limit is causing the hard drive to not function properly

 

[Jorsoft]

There was that, wasn't that fixed with the sp1 or sp2 install, though? It's been so long since that's been an issue lol.

 

[hrlow2]

hello. Doubt if too old. Personally have old IBM 300GL with P3(728MHz) running XP Home SP2 just fine. Sorry KurrentEweser, but rig should handle it if comparable to mine.

 

[KurrentEweser]

hello. Doubt if too old. Personally have old IBM 300GL with P3(728MHz) running XP Home SP2 just fine. Sorry KurrentEweser, but rig should handle it if comparable to mine.

His bios may still need updating. I've got a P3 650 laptop that runs XP just fine.