PC not seeing HD on startup

  • Thread starter Thread starter mark davies
  • Start date Start date
M

mark davies

Can anyone shed any light on this?

On startup the pc fails to find the hard drive.

I have to enter setup to detect the drive then exit saving the changes - all
is then fine until the machine is next turned off.

All bios and cache settings are enabled.

I thought it may have been the battery which i have replaced but it still
happens. Could it be anything to do with the RAM in the machine or am i
barking up the wrong tree?

MB is K7S5A running WinXP Professional

Thanks in advance.
 
mark davies said:
Can anyone shed any light on this?

On startup the pc fails to find the hard drive.

I have to enter setup to detect the drive then exit saving the changes -
all
is then fine until the machine is next turned off.

All bios and cache settings are enabled.

I thought it may have been the battery which i have replaced but it still
happens. Could it be anything to do with the RAM in the machine or am i
barking up the wrong tree?

MB is K7S5A running WinXP Professional

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
I think you will find this is a known fault on some K7S5A's. I gave up with
the damn things after being bitten by three of 'em.
The only other possibility is that you have the reset CMSO jumper in the
wrong position.

SteveH
 
I had a similar problem with an old western digital drive and a DFI
motherboard. If the HD takes a long time to boot, the CMOS may time-out and
miss it. If you can set the search time for the IDE devices in the CMOS,
set this to the largest setting.

There was a trick of removing one of the pins or cutting a wire on the 80
ribbon cable connector, which made the HD appear to be always on. I gave up
and just used a newer drive in my motherboard.

Also, if you manually configure the drive according to the specs as opposed
to using auto recognition in the CMOS, you could also better your chances.

Best wishes,

Pete
 
mark davies said:
Can anyone shed any light on this?

On startup the pc fails to find the hard drive.
Click to expand...
Someone suggested the drive doesn't ready fast enough.

Have you tried hitting the reset button after the POST is almost
complete? I do that as a work-around in a similar situation.

The POST doesn't find the drive initially, but by the time the
POST is done the drive is actually ready. Hitting the reset
button causes POST to run again without powering off the drive,
so the drive is seen.
 
mark davies said:
Can anyone shed any light on this?

On startup the pc fails to find the hard drive.
Click to expand...
Someone suggested the drive doesn't ready fast enough.

Have you tried hitting the reset button after the POST is almost
complete? I do that as a work-around in a similar situation.

The POST doesn't find the drive initially, but by the time the
POST is done the drive is actually ready. Hitting the reset
button causes POST to run again without powering off the drive,
so the drive is seen.
 
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