Brian said:
Ann Thank you for replying. Let me see if i can answer your questions so
you'll know more about the situation.
1. I have 4 kids and they have downloaded all kinds of stuff to the
computer. I wanted to "clean the slate" so I removed the secondary hd
(wanted to make sure nothing happened to it by accident when i
reformatted.
i formatted the drive using xp but it only came up as a 130gig limitation.
I
used wd software the first time to correct the limitation problem which it
did and both drives read 149gig. so what i did was i took my original hd
that came with the computer(120 western digital) which still had xp os on
it.
I put that as primary then put my 160gig primary as secondary. I then went
in and used the western digital software data lifeguard tools and
reformatted. I then shut down disconnected both drives and put the 160
primary back on to the end connection. I then loaded xp. booted fine,
worked fine. I connected my other 160gig (which I have saved everything
to )
to the middle
slot on the ribbon. when i turn it on it stays on the dell screen and
after
about 20 seconds comes up 0 primary hd not found 1primary hd not found.
checked bios and reads unknow devices for primary hd 0 and 1. restarted
several times and kept on doing the same thing. Now here is the funny
part.
I removed my secondary 160 and put my original 120 wd hd on as secondary
and
loads fine. Keep in mind it has a os on it. the question is did my 160
hd
die just that fast? It was working fine. did the wd software change
something some where? mother board? I don't know.
2. i switche the ribbon cable out to see if there was a problem with the
cable. It did the same thing with both cables so I know the ribbon is not
the problem.
3. both hds were woking together on cable select for past 2 yrs. I even
tried changing the jumpes to master and slave. Still the same thing, will
not
boot if that hd is on. I even trie putting the secondary as primary by
its
self and computer won' t reconize it even to format it. i did make sure
that i used the end of the ribbon as primary and middle as secondary. If
you
have any more ideas or suggestions I would greatly appreciate it . Again
thank you for taking the time to help me-Brian
Brian:
Let me see if I have this straight...
1. You had two 160 GB HDs in the system - your primary boot drive and a
secondary HD you were using for storage.
2. Using the WD software, you made a fresh XP install of the primary HD
after disconnecting your secondary HD. Or did you use the XP installation CD
to perform this fresh install, including the partitioning & formatting?
3. I assume the fresh install went without incident, right? But after
performing this fresh install you discovered the system apparently ran up
against the large-capacity HD limitation barrier, i.e., only about 128 GB of
that 160 GB (actually about 149 GB) was recognized by the system. And there
had been no previous problem in this area, right? The system had previously
recognized the full-capacity, i.e., about 149 GB, of that drive, right?
4. And you had not changed any connections, jumper settings, etc. other than
disconnecting your secondary HD when you installed the XP OS, right? Not a
single setting was changed, yes?
5. So now when you discovered the full capacity of that 160 GB drive had not
been recognized, (and here's where I get confused)...
a. You then used the WD software to re:format that drive so that the full
capacity of the drive was recognized?, or,
b. You changed HDs and substituted another (original) 120 GB HD for the 160
GB one?
What do you mean when you say you used the WD software "the first time to
correct the limitation problem"? What "first time"?
Brian, as I got to this point in my intended message to you, I realized that
I really don't have an accurate picture of exactly what transpired that led
to your problem and more importantly, I'm thus unable to provide you with
(what I would hope would be) a specific & detailed "fix" to your problem. So
let me instead provide you with some "generic" comments and hope this will
somehow lead to a resolution of the problem.
1. As I previously indicated, in an XP environment there is no need to use
any third-party program to partition/format your HD prior to a fresh install
of the OS. It's always best to use the XP installation routine to do this.
2. As long as your motherboard's BIOS recognizes large-capacity disks, and
you've installed SP1 and SP2 onto the OS, the system will recognize the
full-capacity of drives > 137 GB. Again, there is no need to use any
third-party program to do this.
3. When installing your HDs you must ensure that they are
connected/configured correctly. That of course, includes jumper settings
depending upon how you're setting up your system - Cable Select,
Primary/Secondary, Master/Slave, etc.
Perhaps the best course at this point is to try another fresh install of the
XP OS on your 160 GB HD. Following that, access Disk Management to determine
that all is well concerning the accurate recognition of the drives involved.
Incidentally, I'm assuming in all this that the OEM nature of the Dell
machine is not an issue here and that you're using a retail copy of the XP
OS. And, as I said previously, that your "updating" of the BIOS didn't cause
any problem here.
Anna
