no read/write to hdd

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

I have an old pcchips m560 m/board and the bios will recognise the hdd but can not read or write to it. Any ideas how to fix this?

James

[Rainbow]

Does the HDD work on another board?

Yes. I formated it on another board and even copied some files to it but the old board will not read or write to it.

James

[ajzchips]

Are you using it as a slave (or secondary master) drive? Just asking because you mentioned that you formatted it elsewhere and copied some files onto it.
If so, can you read/write to it in MSDOS mode? If affirmative, then are you experiencing problems in Windows? If affirmative, then perhaps you might want to check if its DMA checkbox is on. If affirmative, then disable DMA/UDMA.

Thanks for the replies, no the drive is set up as master and I can not access it at all even in dos. I can boot from a floppy and recognise the hard drive but can not access it any way.


James

[Rainbow]

If you boot from floppy and run FDISK, do you see your HDD there? You may need to repartition and reformat the drive.

If I do this I get the message 'error reading fixed disk.'

James

[Rainbow]

What drive is that? Is the drive properly configured in BIOS?

It should be the 'c' drive since it is the only fixed/hard drive connected.
The drive is recognised and I am given the size,cyln,head etc although the size is greyed out but I still cannot access it


James

Here is what i have tried and the results.
I tried to reflash the bios with the correct file and with a newer flasher that will flash the boot block area,ami82602 as opposed to amiflash633. No change.
Tried the hdd in another computer,managed to read/ write to it no problems. installed win98 on it and tried it on old board, still will not recognise it .
tried hdd out of newer computer on old board and what do you know it recognised it and tried to load, but i shut it down before it changed any drivers or files.
I think my problem is this old hdd has got lazy or something so I will buy another hdd and hopefully this will work.

thanks for your help and ideas


James

[Rainbow]

BTW.: What drive is that?

[NickS]

You don't have any add-on card (e.g. Adaptec SCSI 1540/1542) which could be using the HD interrupt, do you ? That would be one reason why the BIOS could ID the drive but then fail it.

Further things to do:
Find IDEID.exe, put it on a boot floppy and see what it can tell you about the drive.

drive is a 3.2g Maxtor.
found that file from google and run it and it found the drive and recognised it. don't know if there is any significance in that, but every thing is working perfectly now. Life is a mystery, and so are computers!


James