One for the experts, please help

[moviedude25]

A friend dropped off a computer to me last night with a brand new 160 Gig Hard drive he wanted to have WinXp installed on. I have done this a ton of times and accepted the task. However last night I loaded windows on the hard drive while formatting the drive using WinXP formater to only boot it up and constantly see an error that no boot record was found on the drive. It never went into the Windows setup screen after the initial loading and copying. I have commerical XP software and have loaded it before so it can't be the software. So I then took the Western Digital formating software and reformated the drive that way. I didn't want to use it at first because it has a tendency to add a second partition on the hard drive and I was thinking that it might have made the wrong patition the primary patition and didn't see the other. So then I reloaded Xp on the drive and got the same error, no boot record. For the record no other drives other then one CDR drive was installed on the mainboard, and the drive was clearly seen in the Bios. So I decided after the 4th failure to take a break from this and work on it tonight.

I thought about it today and decided to take the 160Gig drive and load Windows XP all the way on the same hard drive but this time I had put it into another computer to load windows. After I saw that it was installed I uninstalled all the device drivers thinking it might screw up when I put it into the computer it was supposed to be in and placed it back into the computer it failed on last night. Again it shows up as having no boot record on the hard drive. I know Windows was working a second ago on the same hard drive but in this computer it doesn't. The computer it worked on was newer. Now I decide to test a theory that maybe the problem is the actual size of the drive as this is an older motherboard from 2002 so I take a 40 Gig hard drive with Windows on it and do not change any of the BIOS settings and it loads that hard drive fine. Now I'm thinking that I need to flash upgrade the BIOS but I can not find an upgrade for this motherboard.

The motherboard was made by American Megatrends but the version is confusing to me. It says it is "release 02/06/2002 S" and the BIOS string is:

62-0206-001131-00101111-040201-SiS735-M830LR

The problem here is AMI www.megatrends.com (http://www.megatrends.com) shows that this is not a true Megatrends board based on http://www.megatrends.com/support/bios.cfm as it doesn't show that brand in the string and tells me to get the upgrade somewhere else. The computer was bought at pcinfinity.net and they don't have any BIOS upgrades either. So I have been looking for the past 2 hours for a BIOS upgrade for this and can't find anything and not sure what to do now.

So here are my questions for getting this hard drive to work in this computer:

1) Would it be the BIOS that is keeping the hard drive from seeing the actual Boot Record? Am I going the wrong direction thinking the problem is an older version of the BIOS? If this is the problem how can I get an upgrade if I can't find one? Anyone know where to get one?

2) Is there some strange setting in the BIOS I could change to get this drive to boot up? Something I might be missing? Unfortuantly this Western Digital hard drive does not have the jump settings to reduce it to 38 Gigs like my Maxtor does. If I were able to do that I might be able to rule out the size of the hard drive being an issue. The only jumper settings on the drive are Master/Slave/Cable Select and it is currently set to MASTER on IDE Slot 0

Please help me out here if you've got any clues on how to get this thing to work for me. This one is killing me!!!

[Neo]

1) Possibly, make sure that all your bios settings are correct and that its set to boot from the hard drive, and not another device. See if boot swap is disabled, if so enable it.

2) Look at #1.


If you want to upgrade the bios, go to the manufactors site of the motherboard. Check the brand and model of it either from pcinfinity.net or some were on the motherboard itself.

[PhilEnfield]

Another possibility here is the >137gb barrier.

Windows XP does not support HDD's greater than 137gb, without SP1 (or later) being installed.
The original Windows XP (RTM or Release to Manufacturing) and previous Windows 2000 Service Packs do not support ATA interface disc drives larger than 137GB.


Also your BIOS has to support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing, as yo have indicated.


Having said that, the 137gb barrier normally results in the drive being reported smaller in size.


If you feel a BIOS upgrade a bit risky, due to Identification problems ... one other opttion open to you ..... is to install an Ultra ATA/133 PCI Controller Card. These are very cheap if you shop around.


HTH

[Van Nugent]

Yep, Phil has a good point. If you're not comfortable with flashing the BIOS or if a BIOS update is not available, an ATA-133 controller card is recommended, which allows you to connect more drives than what the mobo lets you and provides the RAID functions that you'd love. You can also use it on other system in the future as well. If you've not already bought an PATA HDD, I would recommend an SATA controller instead of buying an PATA controller. Both are dirt cheap these days. :)

[marts3072]

Some manufactures provide fast and easy bios upgrades. Asus provide a cd that not only has a probe to test all settings, but in 1 click it will inform you of any upgrades available and download/install them hassle free. Ive done this many times on motherboards and have never had any problems. Obviously, some manufacturers are better than others!

All you need to do is boot from cd in the bios and reinstall windows, then download sp1/2 to fix the hard drive size issue.