Hard drive issues

[xander251]

Im rebuilding my old gateway 2000 (pentium 133 lol) and im having a problem with it recognizing the harddrive. The harddrive is plugged in correctly to the primary IDE port on the motherboard but when the computer boots it cannot find the harddive. It finds the floppy, and cd-rom drives just fine, but no harddive. Ive tried using several different ide cables so thats not the problem and the harddrive appears to be spinning up correctly but the the computer still cant recognize it. Does anyone know of what I can do to fix this?

The basic computer specs are:
Pentium 133Mhz
32MB RAM
4.2gig Quantum HD
Cd-rom/floppy

Please help

[kissfan]

Try poping into the BIOS and making sure that you have Auto Detect enabled for the primary channel on your board.

[Cricket]

Do you have the original hard drive? Check the drive priority jumper on it to see if it's set to master or to CS or CSel (cable select) and set the new drive the same way.

Install the hard drive after the jumper is set correctly and power up the system. Go into BIOS and see if the new hard drive is detected properly. If not, you'll have to do a auto detect so the BIOS knows what kind of hard drive is there. Save and Exit.

What OS are you going to install?

:) Cricket

[mike breck]

Has this 4.1GB HD ever worked with this PC before?

If not, then (depending on the BIOS) there may a BIOS limitation of 2Gb. Go to the gateway Web Site and see if there is a BIOS update for your Gateway model which addresses the issue.

The other options are to install EZ-BIOS (Drive Overlay software) from Maxtor (contained on the Maxblast program) or use a Promise PCI controller card.

HTH

[ktkendall]

I also remember putting a 4G HD into my old storebought Pentium PC, and had same problem with the 2G limitation, but it did recognize the new 4G HD, but only let me use 2G of it. I think you probably just need to go into the BIOS and autodetect this new one then you'll see if it has the 2G limitation...
My only other thought is that the 4G drive you are trying to install is probably not new,, Correct??? So it may actually be a bad drive...