"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