strange problem with hard drive
 

I have a 30GB Western Digital EIDE hard drive. Model: WD300BB ... Params:
LBA 58633344 ... It has an Active Primary partition (c20GB) and an extended
partition with one logical drive(c10GB). My symptons are as follows...

1) BIOS either takes a very long time recognising the drive or it fails to
but windows will still see the logical drive.
2) DOS cannot see the hard drive
2) I can access the logical partition from windows but not the Primary
partition. (I added this drive to another system)
3) Partition magic does not recognise the drive


I would ideally like to able to diagnose this, but am rather stuck. I have
checked all regular causes such as primary drive being hidden, bad ide
cables and tried hd on other systems... I would say that it's time to ditch
the drive but would at least like to know what has caused this -

tia

"James" wrote in message
...
I have a 30GB Western Digital EIDE hard drive. Model: WD300BB ... Params:
LBA 58633344 ... It has an Active Primary partition (c20GB) and an
extended
partition with one logical drive(c10GB). My symptons are as follows...

1) BIOS either takes a very long time recognising the drive or it fails to
but windows will still see the logical drive.
2) DOS cannot see the hard drive
2) I can access the logical partition from windows but not the Primary
partition. (I added this drive to another system)
3) Partition magic does not recognise the drive


I would ideally like to able to diagnose this, but am rather stuck. I have
checked all regular causes such as primary drive being hidden, bad ide
cables and tried hd on other systems... I would say that it's time to
ditch
the drive but would at least like to know what has caused this -

tia



since you are using it as a 2nd drive, the primary partition should not
be set active.

the drive is not necessarily bad...but your bios seems to have trouble
detecting it.
you may want to try setting the parameters manually

"philo" wrote in message
...

"James" wrote in message
...
I have a 30GB Western Digital EIDE hard drive. Model: WD300BB ...
Params:
LBA 58633344 ... It has an Active Primary partition (c20GB) and an
extended
partition with one logical drive(c10GB). My symptons are as follows...

1) BIOS either takes a very long time recognising the drive or it fails
to
but windows will still see the logical drive.
2) DOS cannot see the hard drive
2) I can access the logical partition from windows but not the Primary
partition. (I added this drive to another system)
3) Partition magic does not recognise the drive


I would ideally like to able to diagnose this, but am rather stuck. I
have
checked all regular causes such as primary drive being hidden, bad ide
cables and tried hd on other systems... I would say that it's time to
ditch
the drive but would at least like to know what has caused this -

tia



since you are using it as a 2nd drive, the primary partition should not
be set active.

the drive is not necessarily bad...but your bios seems to have trouble
detecting it.
you may want to try setting the parameters manually



the drive is not active in the second system, it is not on the primary ide -
it is on the secondary, - params have been set manually and still the same
problem - I ran Western Digitals diag disk and it says that 'the bios is not
controlling this disk' - now I would like to know if this is refering to the
drives bios or the motherboards? - I would presume the drives as same
problem occurs on different systems. Is there a way to upgrade the firmware
on the drive - as it seems that it could be the problem - what are your
thoughts?

thanks

snipped

the drive is not active in the second system, it is not on the primary
ide -
it is on the secondary, - params have been set manually and still the same
problem - I ran Western Digitals diag disk and it says that 'the bios is
not
controlling this disk' - now I would like to know if this is refering to
the
drives bios or the motherboards? - I would presume the drives as same
problem occurs on different systems. Is there a way to upgrade the
firmware
on the drive - as it seems that it could be the problem - what are your
thoughts?



Assuming you are using win9x... a 2nd harddrive does not require
the bios to detect it...windows will see the drive ok without the bios.
So what you've described...I've definately seen before. The reason partiton
magic does not see the drive is because PM does require the bios seeing it.
The primary partition might be NTFS perhaps and thus invisible to win9x?

Anyway, I would not give up on the thing yet. Try seeing if the bios
can detect the drive with no other drive in the machine. You may want to
also try auto detect...or different jumper settings etc.

as a last resort, you may want to try installing drive overlay software such
as EZ Bios. I know I have had to use it before when I;ve had problems with
the bios detecting the drive