No drive attached The bios is not installed

[Garry L]

I think its been too long since I built a new system and I'm having
harddrive problems. Or old Dim Brain problems.

P4C800-E deluxe Winbond Ram (2 512Mb)
HD Western digital Caviar 120Gb from old system. Fdisked and unformated. No
partitions. Ready for fresh install of WinXP Pro.
HD is plugged into Primary Ide as Master. Cd is on same cable as slave
When I go to Setup in the Ami Bios it shows the HDrive and CD-Rom listed
correctly.

Bios is set to all defaults ( I have tried several other settings also)
As far as I can tell I installed the FastTrack drivers using F6
When booting I get through the Asus logo, it post up to,
Promise Bios verson 1.00.0.33
Detecting
No drive attached The bios is not installed

If I boot with the Window XP Cd every thing is fine untill I try to format
a raw partition to be able to install Windows XP.
Warning, Windows cannot format this partition choose another.

If I boot with the Window XP Cd every thing is fine untill I try to format
a raw partition to be able to install Windows.
Warning is cannot format this partition choose another.

Just for trying, I fdisked the harddrive fomated it with a fat32 partition
ran scansdisk from a Win 98 boot disk, and every thing was fine untill I
tried to install Win XP it gave me a blue screen of death shortly after it
began copying files.
I put the HD back in the old system and was able to format the drive with
NFTS and installed Windows XP with no problems.

Thanks in Advance for any help
Garry L

 

[Ron]

Hmm. Well Garry, I'm not familiar w that mobo. Is there a different IDE
connector for onboard RAID? Aside from that, (and rather than attempting a
diagnosis), may I make a suggestion?

Try removing the jumper on the HDD, and move the CD-ROM to SEC/MASTR. Go
thru the normal steps as you have done, and see what happens.

Hopefully this tiny/simple adjustment will do the trick.

Please post a follow-up.
Ron

 

[Mistoffolees]

I think its been too long since I built a new system and I'm having
harddrive problems. Or old Dim Brain problems.

P4C800-E deluxe Winbond Ram (2 512Mb)
HD Western digital Caviar 120Gb from old system. Fdisked and unformated. No
partitions. Ready for fresh install of WinXP Pro.
HD is plugged into Primary Ide as Master. Cd is on same cable as slave
When I go to Setup in the Ami Bios it shows the HDrive and CD-Rom listed
correctly.

Bios is set to all defaults ( I have tried several other settings also)
As far as I can tell I installed the FastTrack drivers using F6
When booting I get through the Asus logo, it post up to,
Promise Bios verson 1.00.0.33
Detecting
No drive attached The bios is not installed

If I boot with the Window XP Cd every thing is fine untill I try to format
a raw partition to be able to install Windows XP.
Warning, Windows cannot format this partition choose another.

If I boot with the Window XP Cd every thing is fine untill I try to format
a raw partition to be able to install Windows.
Warning is cannot format this partition choose another.

Just for trying, I fdisked the harddrive fomated it with a fat32 partition
ran scansdisk from a Win 98 boot disk, and every thing was fine untill I
tried to install Win XP it gave me a blue screen of death shortly after it
began copying files.
I put the HD back in the old system and was able to format the drive with
NFTS and installed Windows XP with no problems.

Thanks in Advance for any help
Garry L

IIRC, nothing to worry over since the error message applies
to the Promise controller and S-ATA and/or RAID HD setups.
If neither being used, the setting can be disabled in bios
and message will disappear. Essentially, the message is
"true" and reported accordingly.

Not sure about the initial HD setup but if being formatted
for FAT32, then note that there are partition size limits.
Probably the case since NTFS works.

 

[RonK]

Try putting the cd on ide 2 temporarily and jumper the WD as Cable Select by
itself on IDE1.

 

[Bob]

Garry, Why are you loading the FasTrack drivers? It's not necessary on a
non-raid system. When installing WinXp, don't hit F6 to install the SCSI or
RAID drivers from floppy. It's not needed with a single HD, and may be why
you're experiencing your problem.