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General discussion

Adding a HDD when building a computer.

Nov 26, 2004 7:29AM PST

Ok. IU am building a computer, i have got the floppy drive working, i can boot off a floppy, i can even play a really bad dos game. But that is about all. I have a 4 gig HDD, I have plugged it in and set the jumpers (i set it master), but when i go into the dos prompt, i can't find C: drive. I know you have to set something up in the BIOS, but i can't work out what. Can anyone help me with this?

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Re: Adding a HDD when building a computer.
Nov 26, 2004 8:52AM PST

assuming drive is not dead,

in such cases, the most likely culprit is the cable. is very easy to get the cable in backwards in the board or in the drive. --fj

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Re: Adding a HDD when building a computer.
Nov 26, 2004 9:23AM PST

My friend who gave me the drive and he tested it before hand. So I am sure it is still working. Um, I have tried the cabel different ways, i will yry again. In the bios do i just put "Auto" next to the primary master drive?

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Re: Adding a HDD when building a computer.
Nov 26, 2004 1:29PM PST

Yes...Try it in Auto. Should work IF that is the only problem. Is your power supply to the drive delievering the proper sustained voltage? Just one suggestion out of a couple. I'm by no means an expert in the area, but sometimes the quirkiest problems can be something not expected.

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Re: Adding a HDD when building a computer.
Nov 26, 2004 2:36PM PST

I know that. I will probably end up working it out......... just one question. When I found the half built computer lying around, I haden't decided that I was going to re build it, so I took the mother board out (obviously I un-plugged all the calbes). That was when I decided to re build it, so I put the mother board back in, got the power to it, but there were still some cables not plugged in (the ones leading from the in built speaker, from the restart button.etc). I decided that maybe the HDD wasn't working because that wasen't plugged in. So I pluged all of them in, most of them i think are in the correct spot. (I know the in-built speaker one and the restart one is). Are any of these cables important for the HDD to work>

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Yes, set to "auto"
Nov 27, 2004 9:08PM PST

If the Hdd is already loaded with an OS, W9x, this older PC may not recognize the partition properly. Use a boot disk and "fdisk" to check Hdd properties. It may pop up about "no partition defined", or you may see that fdisk only sees 3.7gb and the partition is 3.8gb. Then you have to re fdisk and reformat and reload.
Listen to the Hdd to see if it is spinning up. Check the IDE cable, pin 1, red side, to see that it is in the mobo slot and Hdd right.