Installing Ultra Ata Hard-drive

[skelley521]

I am trying to install a 2nd hard-drive on an older system. Its a 10G Ultra ATA (Quantum BigFoot TS). I first removed the original IDE hard-drive and set the BIOS to ATA instead of DMA, connected the hard-drive and tried booting.
I received a 'controller error' message. I have tried setting the jumpers on the ATA drive to master, slave, and cable select and still no joy. I even changed the BIOS around and booted several times....'controller failure'.
I have a diagnoses disk but with the controller failure it boots and says no dos.
I have also tried to boot with a start-up disk, but it says it doesn't detect a hard drive.
Does the ATA disk need to be flashed with firmware or do you believe that it is shot.

Any ideas??

Thanks,
Steve

[Broken]

kind of hard to say without being there and seeing what's going on....
but, if i had to guess i would say it's shot.
:(

[Darth Sushi]

Some older mobo cannot detect a HD larger than 8 GB. Also, did you try the HD by itself (nothing connected on the same IDE cable)? I've ran into problems where certain IDE devices cannot share the same cable.

[skelley521]

Also, did you try the HD by itself (nothing connected on the same IDE cable)?
Yep, tried it by itself first just to eliminate any conflicts.
It would give 2 or 3 hard clicking sounds on boot.

[cwctv]

I first removed the original IDE hard-drive and set the BIOS to ATA instead of DMA

Don't know what you mean by that if you mean took the DMA off just leave it on AUTO (all of them) the m/board will sort it out.



Yep, tried it by itself first just to eliminate any conflicts.
It would give 2 or 3 hard clicking sounds on boot.

U/S shouldn't sound like that very light clicks yes for an older drive,the controler arm as gone and could make it drop onto the platter.

[sparsely]

I'm with cwctv on this one

Don't know what you mean by that if you mean took the DMA off just leave it on AUTO (all of them) the m/board will sort it out.

If you've played with the CMOS settings too much, restore Fail-Safe Defaults.

[zapjb]

Did you try different cables?

[skelley521]

The BIOS doesnt have an auto setting, just :PIO 1 thru 4; DMA and ATA.
The cable is good as I use it to connect the other hard-drive and it boots up fine (good point though).
Don't want to get into the CMOS again....it was tricky setting up IRQ's for PCI and ISA devices.

Thanks though,
Steve

[topgun396]

The clicking sounds indicate the hardrive is bad. The needle "like a record player"
is hopping around the platters inside the hd,looking for a boot sector. It's shot :(

[sparsely]

:o
ISA Devices!
:o

God! How old is this machine?

[skelley521]

Yeppers ISA...lol...it was a $1500.00 system in 99'
I have come the conclusion that the hard-drive must be bad or needs to be flashed with firmware?!?
I found an old 540M HD and it detected it and installed it fine with the other 4G one installed also.
Its the kids 'puter and it's also on the family network. They are 8 and 10 yrs old and good for them.

Thanks for all your help,
Steve