Hard Drives not showng up

[Bombu]

I have 3 hard drives that are recognised by the bios but only one of them is regognised by any os. Windows 95 recognises one, but dos doesn't regognise any of them.

[AlienCC]

What size are the harddrives?
What type of harddrives are they (I.E. ATA, SCSI, SATA, etc.)?
What is your motherboard brand and model?

If you can answer any or all of those questions, it will help us help you.

--AlienCC

[Arcane Wizard]

How have you partitioned everything?

[elfprince13]

What are you booting off of? A floppy or a CD-ROM? or a combo of the 2?

[Arcane Wizard]

[elfprince13]

[shadowing]

He could possibly be booting off other drives.

Can you post any more info about your current drives?

[Brazucs]

I don't think s/he is anywhere around anymore...

[Arcane Wizard]

[NETWizz]

If you BIOS recognizes them and your OS doesn't perhaps they are incompatible with your OS.

For instance, DOS will not recognize SATA drives.

Try Win 2000+ or Linux.

If the drive is bigger than 137 GB, you will need 48-Bit LBA.

If you are using Win95, you should use OSR2. The first one does not support FAT32.

You may also wish to check the jumper settings.

[elfprince13]

[Bombu]

First of all yes I am still here, I usually can only post in the morning though.

I've tried these drives separately.

500mb drive:

- Regognised by windows 95, but not by bios (automaticly set bios ) or dos

- Works fine other than this, this occured when my computer messed up once

2 gigabyte drive 1:

- Regognised by bios, not by any os (used to be OpenBSD on drive, that could be why. possibly part of its security was left)

- May only work as a master because of this ^ but it has no os on it (formatted).

2 gigabyte drive 2: (LBA mode drive, thats what autodetect drive mode finds anyway...)

- Seagate

- Regognised by bios, not by dos and I've been unable to test with windows because of lack of free time.

- Fdisk tries to format it for win/dos but either takes a LONG time or freezes (im not sure which).

I've tried the 500mb drive on a IBM ps/2 pentium 166 and the other two drives on an ACER (I think its acer, thats what the case is) pentium 133. Both of these computers have win 95 and I've also used a dos bootdisk and the "restart in dos mode" to test these drives.

The pentium 166 has a Maxtor hd as a bootdrive. With the pentium 133 I've tried with another hd to boot off and just the drives themselves.

[Brazucs]

[Bombu]

I have the right jumper settings.

[NETWizz]

Okay, I think I finally figured out what is going on.

Forget about the 500 MB drive. It is not big enough to matter. I am confused how it isn't recognized by the BIOS but it is by Win95. I mean, Win95 shouldn't be able to see it if the BIOS can't.

Now on down the list. You stated that you have 2 2 GB drives that are detected by the BIOS. These drives should be set in LBA mode, FYI.

Now, I am assuming the drives are detected by Windows, but FDISK is hanging. This is a known issue. It happens when you have a non-windows OS on the drive and then try to delete a non-windows partition. This usually happens with the older versions of FDISK only. The problem ususally has to do with an unknown disk label. To be more exact about the error, Fdisk parses the beginning of the drive to check the structure, figure out what is currently installed... Well, when it runs into something unexpected or unknown to it like an OpenBSD partition, it just stops working.

The fix is really easy.

All you have to do is wipe clean the Master Boot Record.


Here is the procedure:

Boot your computer off of a Linux startup disk or CD. You can use something like System Rescue Linux, Knoppix, or or even a simple recovery linux floppy. It does not matter what it is provided it has dd.

Once at the Linux # prompt (the prompt lhas a a "#" at the end) you can use dd like this


# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

That should take almost no time at all and you should be back at a prompt. That command will erase the first 512 bytes of the hard disk. Doing this will remove any Partitions, the Boot Loader, Master Boot Record, and even the Disk Lablel.

Once done, just remove the CD or Floppy, insert your install media for Windows/DOS whatever and then just do a hard reset via the reset button or power switch. Don't worry about a proper shutdown of Linux because it isn't installed, so you have no file system to corrupt.

Fdisk should then see a "Like Brand New" hard drive that appears to be from the factory to it. It will happily create a Disk Lablel, Partition Table, ... without really telling you what it is doing. The installer will then format a filesystem (probably FAT but choose FAT32 if you get a choice). Upon completion of the format, it will copy the files including io.sys and msdos.sys (kernel files needed to load the system). Those files get put in the appropriate place and a tiny assembly program is loaded to the MBR to initialize the kernel and jump the the Boot Sector, which is the first block of the partition you install the OS too.

To make a long story short, if you erase the first 512 blocks, fdisk won't hang anymore.

[Bombu]

I dont have a linux disk. Is there any dos programs that will do this?

[shadowing]

[NETWizz]

Never tried that one, but it looks okay from this perspective. Give it a go.

Once you get it started, type

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

After that, you should be good to go

[Bombu]

I can't use the zoolinux disks, it loads and then says "starting kernel..." and the computer restarts.

[NETWizz]

Try something else then like BG Rescue Linux.

http://omnibus.uni-freiburg.de/~giannone/r...index.orig.html