Hardware Experts

Help installing HD needed..

[Nick_W]

Hi all,

So, here's the coup: I'm not certain which of the two sockets in the motherboard (asus a7v133) the cable (flat, wide one) goes in?

The black one nearest the edge or the blue next to it..

Also, does anyone know what to look for to reset the bios?

Many thanks and sorry for being vague, i wouldn't be in this mess if I knew what I was doing ;)

Nick

[Macro]

Nick, u around now?

[Nick_W]

Where else? ;)

Nick

[Macro]

OK, as soon as the PC comes on press the delete button when it instructs you to "Press delete to enter setup"

[Macro]

That will take you into the BIOS setup. Have you been in one of those before? Don't make any changes there to anything that you don't know about. When you do make changes you can always either save them or exit without saving.

Now browse through there and get a feel for the screen that cover hard disk related issues like DMA, primary/secondary/master/slave ... and terminology like that. Anywhere there do you see your seagate hard disk listed as available?

PS: Also, do you have a Windows 98 boot floppy disk by any chance?

[Nick_W]

Right, got the screen. I see the primary/master etc on the main screen and a bunch of similar stuff under /boot

I'm farily familiar with it but not knowledgable..

Nick

[Macro]

OK, and do you have a boot floppy, or a Windows 98 PC around so that you can make one?

[Nick_W]

Yep, got one.

Nick

[Macro]

Cool!

Now that you are in the BIOS, find the boot sequence and set it to boot first from A:

Then save and exit

Put the floppy in and restart the computer. It will get you to an A prompt. Type in fdisk

(if the PC is set to correctly recognise the disk and the disk is not faulty fdisk will see the drive whether or not it is formatted)

[Macro]

Be careful what you do in fdisk. If you delete an existing partition you will lose all your data. But as long as you steer clear of deleting you shd be OK.

When you type fdisk you may get a message requiring you to press Y or N. Go for Y for the moment. The next fdisk screen will give you options like creating or deleting partitions. You don't want to do either. Go down the menu and you find an option to view the existing partitions. Check that out and get back to me before you exit from fdisk.

[Nick_W]

Ahhh.. let me stop you there.

I'm using the hd right now. I managed to intall (after numerous attempts) to install linux but the thing keeps crashing. (just restarting for no apparent reason).

My main worry is that I've got it installed corretly...?

Nick

[Macro]

aha, if the hard disk is apparently there and apparently working then your connections are all correct.

[Macro]

PCs are not tolerant of any incorrect cabling. Put a cable in wrong - or miss one out - and it'll say there's no hard disk installed.

If you are booting into Linux it's unlikely that you have master/slave settings that Linux doesn't recognise

[Macro]

Maybe the disk is faulty. You can get a very good diagnostic program off Seagate's site. Put that on a floppy and run a full diagnostic on the hard disk (Don't use any other manufacturer's diags - use the Seagate one)

[Nick_W]

Any idea why i might be getting "UltraDMA not installed as no drives found" at startup?

not linux, before the boot process..

Nick

[Macro]

Ultra DMA needs to be turned on in the BIOS. Have another look in there and set UDMA to auto. It will then pick up an UDMA hard disk automatically if one is present, otherwise it will default to PIO mode.

With older versions of Windows you did also need to enable DMA for the hard disk in the Windows Device Manager. I have no idea about Linux, but if you are getting the message after the PC starts to load Linux then that may be something for the Linux forum. (But of course, as you say it's not in Linux)

[DaveAtIFG]

I think standard DMA is a max transfer rate of 33MBs. UDMA is 66MBs and up and requires a UDMA cable to enable. BIOS will default to standard DMA with an "old" cable, in theory. Sounds like you may be using the wrong cable, check your user manual/packing list. You probably received both types of cables with your motherboard.

[Macro]

DaveAtIFG, that is correct. It did not occur to me. It is possible that he's not using the right cable.

I believe that on that particular motherboard the error message for using the wrong cable is "No. 80 cable not connected" or something like that.

[mat]

I meant to suggest this yesterday but got distracted. This link [pcguide.com] follows on from the above.

[Nick_W]

Well, seems I have the right cable. and you can't put them in wrong as they dont' fit.

Blue end connected to the motherboard, black connected to the drive. After 'Detecting' it just says:

"Ultra100 BIOS not installed as there are no drives attached" -- baffling...?

Nick

[RobinC]

Just thought I should add my 2p worth - you only use Master and Slave jumpers on the drives for older style IDE ribbons - if your ribbon cable has Master and Slave printed on it, then instead set the drives to CSel (Cable Select) - imho a lot nicer anyway ;-)

Oh, and if they're "round" cables, there's a pull tag - don't pull on the cable as the pressure might not be even and can literally kill it, use the pull tag instead.

[johnafrid]

Nick,
I know you have done most of the stuff I would do on my system. Try to get a new cmos battery for your m/b. If you have a bad cmos, you might end up having this problem

John

[Nick_W]

Thanks guys,

How do I set the jumpers to 'cable select'? I tried taking the little plastic jumper out with tweasers but couldn't get a grip on it?

Nick

[Nick_W]

You can get a very good diagnostic program off Seagate's site. Put that on a floppy and run a full diagnostic on the hard disk (Don't use any other manufacturer's diags - use the Seagate one)

Is that the one where you can change the DMA? - I tried it and it detected the disk and had it set to DMA 5...

Nick

[Nick_W]

Ok, just to see, I plugged it into the blue raid port. I did not show that error...

Anyone see the significance?

Nick

[Macro]

The diagnostics on the Seagate site would take a long while to run and it will test every bit of data space on the drive. You don't "change" DMAs. If it's showing as DMA 5 that is correct.

There is no alternative to using tweezers and getting the jumpers out. Seagate's website should give you the diagram of what the settings are for your model of disk.

The RAID port does not act like a normal IDE port so you may not see the same error (It acts more like SCSI and shows up in Windows as SCSI - and SCSI's don't show up as UDMA100 etc)

Just as an aside, what a lot of people don't know is that even when using an 80 pin cable if you connect the hard disk to the "middle" socket of the cable you won't get the same speeds from the hard disk as if you kept the middle socket free and connected the hard disk to one end and the mobo to the other.

I've got a lot of old mobos lying around. If I get a chance I'll plug in an Asus A7V133 Raid (is that the one?) and see how I can reproduce your error. But do I take it that the hard disk is working fine otherwise?

[Nick_W]

Just as an aside, what a lot of people don't know is that even when using an 80 pin cable if you connect the hard disk to the "middle" socket of the cable you won't get the same speeds from the hard disk as if you kept the middle socket free and connected the hard disk to one end and the mobo to the other.

I didn't really get that bit. I have the cable running into the blue socket next to the black one that is connected to the CDROM. The blue one is the furthest from the edge and is detected as the primary master...

Running the seatools on the primary ide port (the blue one I mentioned above) it detects it pretty quickly but I gave up waiting for it to find the drive when it was plugged into the raid port..

Make any sense?

Nick

[Macro]

The 80 pin cable that is for the newer hard disks usually has three sockets, one at either end and one in the middle. I ALWAYS avoid using the middle socket for anything. Keep the middle socket free and use the far end socket for the hard disk. If you have other ide devices like cd drives, use a different cable for them.

[Nick_W]

Yep, that's what I'm doing..

Nick

[Nick_W]

Q. Is it possible that the asus a7v133 just doesn't like this drive?

btw, I searched for 'asus a7v133 st340015a' and this thread was the no. 1 result, hehe!

Nick

[DaveAtIFG]

It is possible the BIOS is not recognizing or correctly identifying the drive. Check your BIOS version against the latest available. If yours is substantially out of date, it may be time to flash it with something more recent. My experience is that BIOS versions are invariably thoroughly tested and upgrading a BIOS very rarely induces problems.