Bios Wont/Very Slow to Detect Hard Disk

JimboraeJimborae Newbury, Berks, UK New
edited February 2004 in Hardware
I was swapping out m/boards between pc's on my 2nd rig, going from a KX7 raid to NF7-s.

I knew that I would have to do a re-install of the os but the board's bios wont even detect the old hard disk. It just sits there trying to detect on the boot up screen. Remove the hard disk and it continues to boot on it's merry way. Sometimes it'll detect the hard disk after about 5mins but then it's very slow loading the Win XP cd and once it has & I try to load the os to repair install it'll then error & say no hard disk detected.

Am I gonna have to reformat the disk or does anyone have any other ideas. I know that the hard disk is good , I just think the board and disk are having a hard time going from via to nforce chip set. but i didn't think that would be a problem, except for having to to do a re-install.

Cheers


Jim

Comments

  • NecropolisNecropolis Hawarden, Wales Icrontian
    edited February 2004
    It doesnt matter what you have on your hard drive for it to be detected by the bios. Try putting the drive on cable select and try a different IDE cable. This should be your first port of call.

    Also make sure it is the only device on the chain. Put the cd rom on a different cable.
  • GunnyGunny
    edited February 2004
    Easiest and best way would be a format, then installation of your OS.

    All the parameters of your old computer are on the HD now, and it's quite a stretch to expect it to take off running and find everything it needs now. Even so, you'd probably have a lot of device failures (ones from your old box) and trying to load new devices (ones from your new box)

    In either case, you will have to activate XP again, so I'd put the drive back where it was, backup everything I wanted, then do a clean install in the new box on a formatted drive
  • QCHQCH Ancient Guru Chicago Area - USA Icrontian
    edited February 2004
    I've also had BIOS's that seem to stall on detecting non-exsisting slave drives. If you have nothing hooked up as a slave drive change the BIOS to NONE or DISABLED for that IDE channels Slave. Other than that, Necropolis is correct, BIOS's have different requirements for auto detecting IDE Devices. Make sure the hard drive is Cable Select and that the drive is on the last IDE connector not the one in the middle of the IDE cable.

    Dell's get really picky with SLAVE, MASTER, and CABLE SELECT.
  • JimboraeJimborae Newbury, Berks, UK New
    edited February 2004
    Necropolis_UK wrote:
    It doesnt matter what you have on your hard drive for it to be detected by the bios.


    Thats what I thought. Either ways, I've already tried everything you & others suggest but to no effect.

    It certainly seems like what was on there previously is affecting the boot up. Please dont tell me to wipe the hard disk. :(
  • NecropolisNecropolis Hawarden, Wales Icrontian
    edited February 2004
    Try the drive in another machine. You may have damaged it when removing it from the old machine. Also try updating the bios to the latest version (its worth a go)
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited February 2004
    Usually when it takes awhile to detect the IDE devices for me means one has a wrong jumper, no cable, cable backwards or something along those sorts. Just a wrong setting. Never mattered what was on the HDD.
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited February 2004
    ADDED: Check what has been said earlier first, but something similar to the troubleshooting I outline below as an example might also apply.

    Also, try this as an experiment-- unplug the CD-ROM and DVDs from connectors, make sure you do not have a CD-ROM and HD sharing a cable. IF possible, put the DVD and CD-ROM or CD\RW on the secondary IDE channel if you run HDs on the primary channel. In other words, build up and try just a HD when you get a radically slow post. Once you get a good normally fast post with just HD and video, build out by plugging the secondary channel devices (your removable media drives) in with power off and then see if post time goes back to slow or not, if so, something plugged onto secondary IDE is wonky.

    Also, some boards come with BIOS POST not set to quick POST, and with quick POST off the computer BIOS will check RAM times 3 instead of with one pass.

    On my IC7-Max3, I ran into an interesting thing-- and the ideas of what I looked at and chenged might apply as to things to look for and at:

    Boot order was set to boot from a device that was described as a "PCI Adapter" boot device (I brought motherboard up first time without any HD in computer). POST was slow, no O\S would go on and then boot until boot order was changed so the "PCI adapter" was moved to last place in boot order list. Also, if you have NO SATA drives hooked up, disabling SATA and disabling SATA boot speeds things up. In my case, SATA booting and SATA RAID being on also slowed booting and posting until I turned off what was not used at all.

    Also, check the position of the CMOS\Clock Battery jumper, sometimes it is needful to make sure the jumper is in "normal" or "running" position for fastest booting and fastest posting. Some boards can slow down post a lot if they have a jumper in an odd position.

    Basic rule is to turn off what you definitely do not need, BIOS takes less time to parse out what is in use if it does not have to time-out eliminate queries to things that are not used. It would be nice to have a sheet of paper handy also, write down what you turned OFF and what you turned ON and what tunings you used to get things running smoothly, as the BIOS settings are not normally printable.

    John D.
  • JimboraeJimborae Newbury, Berks, UK New
    edited February 2004
    Ok I'll try some further experimentation and let you know. Thanks for the input so far guys.
  • JimboraeJimborae Newbury, Berks, UK New
    edited February 2004
    Well I finally sorted it but I still don't know what was wrong. I had to low level format the drive then flash the bios. Then go into bios and connect & detect the hard drive at that point. Wierd huh?

    Everytime I connect a new disk either on the sata or on ide have to do the same thing with the drive with the os on it. Disconnect, go into bios, reconnect & detect it.

    Computers bah, i give up.
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