"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