New build will not recognize WD HD

[tranman]

I recently took my son's WD hard drive out of his old machine and tried to install it in his new build. The HD is a Western Digital Caviar 40 gig. The new build is this:

MSI MBOX K8MM-V AMD Socket 754 AMD Athlon64/Sempron VIA K8M800 2x 184Pin VIA UniChrome 2D/3D Barebone - Retail

I put everything together carefully, and when I turned it on the processor and RAM posted, but it hung on the hard drive. I can boot with the CD, but then it says that it cannot find the HD. The HD is on IDE1, and I've tried various jumper settings- cable select, master, nothing, etc. I switched out the cable too. I connected the HD to another system that I have in the house and it recognized it with no problem. I formatted the WD HD because I thought it might have had an issue with the old motherboard.

I'm running Windows XP on all three machines mentioned. The new build has a Sempron processor (2600) and 512M of RAM.

Any ideas?

[Dark Nova]

so your saying that the HD is reconizable in the bios on other pcs except that one, right? also post system specs

watch out for double post

[Panama Red]

WD hard drives used by themselves need to be jumpered either for Single Drive (Neutral) by removing all jumpers or Cable Select with an 80 wire ide cable.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....i=&p_topview=1

[tranman]

I tried booting last night with no jumpers at all on the HD, same result.

When I connected the HD to my other machine, XP found it and I was able to access it through Explorer. The HD worked in my son's machine very well until the minute I removed it to install in the new machine.

Panama, how can I tell if it is an 80 pin cable? I've tried the cable that came new with the barebones, but the same thing happens.

[Panama Red]

Just to clarify, it's not 80 PIN, it's 80 wire. Both the 80 wire and 40 wire cables use 40 pin connectors. The wires on the 80 wire cable are nearly flat while the 40 are clearly noticeable. Also, the 80 wire will have one blue end (attaches to the mobo) one black connector on the other end and a gray connector in the mid postition.

What brand of memory are you using? One stick or two? If it's one stick of 512 Kingston Value Ram, try another brand of memory just to see if it makes a difference. Several of us here have had memory issues with the Kingston VR for some unknown reason.

[tranman]

The new cable that came with the motherboard is 80-wire which is what I used. I'm using 512M of Gigaram (newegg). I don't think the ram is the problem because when it posts it checks the ram and it seems fine.

I'm stumped because there doesn't seem to be many ways to mess up that connection. I've tried the jumpers, the HD does function on other systems, the cable seems to be the right one, the connections are solid. What am I missing? There's no driver issues yet because I don't have anywhere to install them, right?

[Panama Red]

Back to Dark Nova's earlier question. Is it seen in the bios? Are both IDE's showing correctly in the bios?

[tranman]

Both IDEs are showing, but show "none" for content of IDE1. If I hook up my CD drive, it shows as master, plugged into IDE2 (it is set that way). At least that's how I remember it, I don't have the machine with me now.

[Underhanded]

I've read something about this problem before. Most hard drives that you have installed on one motherboard cannot easily be transferred over to a new motherboard. Usually they need to be reformatted and have the OS reinstalled.
I read about something you can try, but I've never tried it myself so I'm unsure of how well it will work.
Reinstall the hard drive into a pc that it is detected on, and then go into device manager and find the driver that controls the hard drive. Go to Update Driver > Manually install from a list > and install the Generic IDE controller driver.. or something like it. This might solve your detection problem, if not, you can just roll back the driver and move on with your life.
hope I was able to help.

[tranman]

I'll try that tonight. I thought that when I reformatted the disk it would solve the problem too, but no.

[Panama Red]

Go back to that WD page I linked above and check out the Single Drive (Neutral) jumpering configurations. You'll need two jumpers to make that work. I bet you have a 9 pin hdd and you have to have the two jumpers installed for the Single Drive configuration to work.