[Fidelio]

Hi,
I guess this is a lost cause, but the story is, I decided to have a go at putting a new mobo in my creaky old family pc, and when i'd got it all set up, it wouldn't detect my hard disks.
I've got a maxtor 20 gb master and a seagate 60gb slave When I booted up, the bios wouldn't detect either.
So I tried them one at a time and it detects the maxtor on its own but not the seagate.
So I tried the seagate in my other PC as a slave and it wouldn't detect either drive there.
So the seagate is knackered in some way, maybe by something I did when assembling the system, or maybe by pure coincidence.

I'm just asking if there is any way to try to fix my seagate drive, or get data from it. I'm pretty poor at backing up, so it's got quite a few photos and stuff on it. Nothing life shattering. If a HD is not detected by the bios is that just the end of the road?

And why is it that when it's connected as a slave, the bios can't see the master either?

Not too hopeful here, but any response would be gratefully appreciated.

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Did you check the jumpers on the back of the drives. If you have both drives set as master you won't be able to see either drive. On seagate drive there should be no jumpers at all.

For Seagate Drives ONLY the jumper pins are this

7531
8642

If you have a jumper on the 7&8 this is Master. If the jumper is on 5&6, this is for Cable select. No jumper at all is for slave only. Even tho you can use CS(cable Select) for multiple drives it always seems to work better when the drives are set as master and slave.

While i have HD's go bad switching from one computer to another, this has happened only once in maybe 100 or more drives i have installed. You also need to make sure that you are not using win 98 to access the second drive if it is formatted as NTFS. Fat 32 systems cannot see ntfs file systems. NTFS systems can see FAT32 file systems. You might try downloading the seatools utilities and see if the drive is seen with them.

When you say the HD is not seen in the BIOS, do you mean that if you enter setup( with the delete, Esc, or F1 keys)you still cannot see the drive? You may need to load the motherboard chipset drivers that come on a CD with new motherboards.

SRX660

[SRX660]

Did you check the jumpers on the back of the drives. If you have both drives set as master you won't be able to see either drive. On seagate drive there should be no jumpers at all.

For Seagate Drives ONLY the jumper pins are this

7531
8642

If you have a jumper on the 7&8 this is Master. If the jumper is on 5&6, this is for Cable select. No jumper at all is for slave only. Even tho you can use CS(cable Select) for multiple drives it always seems to work better when the drives are set as master and slave.

While i have HD's go bad switching from one computer to another, this has happened only once in maybe 100 or more drives i have installed. You also need to make sure that you are not using win 98 to access the second drive if it is formatted as NTFS. Fat 32 systems cannot see ntfs file systems. NTFS systems can see FAT32 file systems. You might try downloading the seatools utilities and see if the drive is seen with them.

When you say the HD is not seen in the BIOS, do you mean that if you enter setup( with the delete, Esc, or F1 keys)you still cannot see the drive? You may need to load the motherboard chipset drivers that come on a CD with new motherboards.

SRX660

[Fidelio]

Thanks,
Yeah, it's not the jumpers. They were set correctly each time. The disk was actually formatted with ext3 as I've been using linux on that PC. I'm not sure thats an issue though.
When I say the bios won't see the disk, I mean that the system hangs while booting and eventually says 'no primary hard disk detected' or something.
It does this even if the bad disk is connected as a slave which I found a bit weird, and it does this on both my pcs, the linux one and the XP one..
And when I go into the bios on either machine it says 'Primary IDE: None' or something, again even if a good disk is connected.
I was really hoping it's a firmware problem, whcih seems most likely given the circumstances. I was hoping to find a way to flash the drive, but obviously, I can't flash what neither of my PCs think is there.
I'm not sure about loading the motherboard chipset drivers. Load them onto what?
The box with the new mobo is running openSuse fine on the other HD, BTW.
But thanks for trying!