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General discussion

Adding a second hard drive with a Pentium III motherboard and Windows 98SE

Mar 8, 2004 12:34PM PST

I had a friend of mine bring me a 40 gb hard drive and a full Windows XP installation disk... I am hung
I can't get the drive recoginized at all.
I tried to install the drive as slave on the hard drive and the c.d rom. I went into the Bios and set the secondary drive as slave... No Joy Sad
I get the A: promt. The floppy drive reads disks!!
I am doing this job on a Gateway computer that has given me specs of up to 80gb of hard drive to upgrade to.
I have the same computer back together again and the floppy drive reads the disk.
I am baffled!!! I have tried everyway that I am space permitted,

I appreciate the help,

Laraine

Discussion is locked

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Re:Adding a second hard drive with a Pentium III motherboard and Windows 98SE
Mar 8, 2004 9:52PM PST

You may need a BIOS update to get a PIII to recognize a 40GB drive. How big is your C: drive?

DId you look for a BIOS update for the motherboard?

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try this
Mar 10, 2004 12:42AM PST

well i would swap things around.

there is always the possiblity that the drive is dead. but it ought be recognized even if there is mechanical failure.

another possibilty is a dead cable. try swapping it out to eliminate it as a cause. try a different cable from the power supply too.

are you certain you have the drive cable inserted properly at both ends? it is easy to get it upside down in some motherboards.
--fj

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Re:Adding a second hard drive with a Pentium III motherboard and Windows 98SE
Mar 10, 2004 7:32AM PST

may need to use cable select mode (CS) instead of master / slave. May need to use an 80 pin IDE cable also instead of older 40 that might be there.