Hard drive not detected by windows?

[philmeehan]

My brother in law is having trouble with his hard drives. One of them, a maxtor diamondmax 9 80gb 7200, is detected by the bios, but not in windows xp pro. It was working fine until he transferred his stuff to a new case and knackered his motherboard somehow. Anyway, he bought a new motherboard and installed everything, and now is having the problems with the drives. The other drive is a maxtor 120gb, which he can't format. It gets to 100% and then says it couldn't complete the format. They drive may be damaged, check it's properly connected etc etc.

Everything else in the pc seems undamaged though, would his damaged motherboard have killed the hard drives but left everything else undamaged?

[PhilEnfield]

It sounds as though he may have them jumpered wrong .... this can cause weird problems, depending on which IDE channel they are on and what else is on that channel.

Find out how he's got them configured and get him to double check he hasn't got 2 jumpers set to master or slave on the same channel.

Not sure about the format failure though ... that sounds a bit ominous.

[philmeehan]

He brought his 80gb drive down to my house, and I put it in my pc. He hadn't partitioned it correctly, so that should be sorted when I've done that. Doesn't sound too healthy does it about the other drive?

[scottish nutter]

i got a hard drive about 6 months ago and when i formated it i had the same message so i took it back and got another and it was fine

[philmeehan]

i got a hard drive about 6 months ago and when i formated it i had the same message so i took it back and got another and it was fine
Was it a brand new drive that you had though? His is about 6 months old.

[Hoss]

THe only thing that comes to mind with me is....
Many older Mobo's cannot/will not recognize large HDD's over 40 GB. However this would/should not be an issue with a newer Mobo

I would check to make sure that it has the newest or at least close to the newest BIOS version installed. And if the problem persists I would look at the Mobo or BIOS as the culprit.
Another thing to check is the HDD jumpers as someone said above and to make sure you are using the correct 80 wire IDE cable to hook them up and not a 40 wire.
Especially if you use the Cable Select settings vs Master/Slave. Which brings up another possible issue. Don't use Cable Select but jumper them as Master & Slave

[philmeehan]

The motherboard is a brand new board, so it shouldn't be a problem with recognising the drive.

Had an update anyway, he is now able to format the drive, but wen he starts to install XP, it loads all the drivers, copies the installation files to his pc, reboots, then he gets a stop error. Not sure what the error is though, until he gets home.