BleepingComputer.com: Installing A New Hard Drive

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Yup.

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Nope.

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Not everything will get bumped. The new partition becomes F: bumping the CD to G:

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Rimmers probably asleep by now being way over in Australia

Does this help at all:



BIOS SCREENS

In that example you would change the IDE PRIMARY 1 to Auto.
IDE PRIMARY 0 will have your existing drive.
If you are lucky, when put the drive to cable select, it will pick it up automatically...maybe..

Joshuacat: Thanks for that link, but I've been there before. I don't have the same BIOS screen(s) shown. Just went into BIOS again to verify.

My Storage tab produces the following menu:

Diskette Drives which shows my A: enabled and B: empty

IDE Devices which when opened lists 5 items all showing "enabled", which are: IDE Drive Translation, Enhanced IDE Transfer, Ultra 33/66, Primary IDE Controller, and Secondary IDE Controller

Boot Order giving choices of A: C: and E: in any order.

Bottom line is that I do not have the DEVICE CONFIGURATION selection shown on the screenshot on the Compaq link.

Honest, in BIOS on multiple occasions, including just a few minutes ago, I've opened every possible tab, menu, etc. and I never get anything about Hard Drives. Guess I'm having another "Compaq Moment". Is this a major problem?

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Those are for your hard drives and your CD will be on the secondary controller. What happens if you highlight one of those and hit enter?

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No way to highlite. All I can do in that screen is use the keyboard up/down arrows to move a little yellow triangular arrow point up or down to line up with one of the five items (such as Primary IDE Controller) and then switch that item from "enabled" to "disabled" using the left-right arrow keys. All were listed as "enabled" where they are now. No effect whatsoever using "Enter" on any of the five. Making me crazy

I didn't mean for this BIOS issue to distract from the jumper problem, and I'm ready to retry using the "Cable Select" option unless you think we need to figure out why I don't show drives in BIOS first. No hurry.

Go for it. Will not harm anything to try.

I'm hoping your Compaq isn't one that needs the Compaq Setup Utility. Did you need that when you added the ram?

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Haven't a clue what the CSU is, altho it could be in there somewhere.

The critter came with 64MB and maybe 4 years ago I bought a 128 stick. That was my first time in the case. Put the 128 in the open slot next to the 64 and got a very crazy multicolored gibberish screen when I tried to start. Took out the 128 and it went back to normal. Took out the 64 and replaced it with the 128 and it has worked fine ever since. The 64 is sitting in a drawer somewhere.

I'm gonna try the jumper "fix" in a few and will probably report back from the computer at the library unless you really warned them about me.

A lot of these Compaq boxes use a lousy truncated BIOS with 'automatic' setup for a lot of the features. The absence of the options means you have to hope CPQ BIOS Setup guesses right about how to mount them.

Just make sure you have all IDE/ATAPI controllers on.

For the drives themselves: WD uses three active jumpers MAster, SLave, and CableSELect. If your 80-line cable is a 'straight' line, your single drive will have no jumper (or a jumper in a Spare or Cable Select setting). A master of two drives will jumper as Master, and a slave drive will jumper as Slave. Note that straight cable drives can be placed in either order, but Cable Select drives must populate with the master drive at the end and slave in the middle. If you are using a Cable Select 80-line cable (usually all three connectors will be different colours), the single drive or both drives of a pair will be set to Cable Select and the master drive will go at the end, the slave on the middle connector.

Maxtor usually has no jumper on a slave drive on a straight cable, one on the master, and a different one on both drives for Cable Select.

As I don't know if your 80-line ribbon is CS or straight, I can't be more specific. Best way to try is to have both drives out but plugged up, and play with the jumpers untoil they both recognise. Place both drives in Cable Select configuration and see if both recognise, then set one to Master of two and the other to Slave if CS doesn't work.

I tried jumpering both HD's to "cable select" (the old one came jumpered that way) , reconnected ribbon and power cable to the new one (using the mid-point ribbon connector). Turned on and got the following message in white letters on black screen

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then after a brief wait, this message

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Pressing any key results in a repeat of those messages. The three-fingered salute at that point causes a restart attempt with the same result. Only way out is tower switch. I double checked physical connections and tried again, same result.

I then jumpered the new unit as "slave" and for the first time re-jumpered the old one to "master". Turned on and got exactly the same results as above on two attempts. Disconnected the new one and here I am on the old one, only difference is that the old one is now jumpered as "master".

I have the printouts of the jumper layouts from both Western Digital and Maxtor, so am certain that I'm doing that correctly. The ribbon cable has never been removed from the old one and it's mid-point connector goes into the new unit in exactly the same way and it appears that it could only go in that way, not reversed. Ditto for the power connector.

REALLY curious as to why the critter can't find an OS whenever the new HD is plugged in, no matter the jumper settings. I'd like to blame it on Compaq, but they were nice enough to provide space and connectors for a second HD (and for a second CD drive as well) so maybe it's not their fault.

My wise old Mom used to tell me that everyone is put here for a reason; looks like my reason is to vex the experts at BC The good news is that it still works so I'm not hurting yet. Gimme some new ideas, hopefully something other than totally removing the old drive and attempting a System Restore on the new one.

I am still back on the BIOS setting, so everything went OK when you set the drive back up, or did you hope the auto configuration worked? It sounds like everything is connected OK from what you are telling us. Triple check your connections and try again. I would be interested to see if the new drive would start up on it's on after running the utility. Just eliminates the ODD chance that the drive is defective out of the box..unlikely, but possible I guess.

Normally, you connect the drive and then go into the BIOS and check to see that it has been detected. So, I should have asked above, what do you see in the BIOS after it is connected?

Joshuacat: Problem is whenever the new drive is connected by it's ribbon and power cable, no matter the jumper settings, I can't boot. All I get is that message stating that no OS could be found (see above)..

I'm a dummy, but it almost seems that BIOS only looks at the new (blank) drive, doesn't find an OS (of course) and for some reason doesn't "see" the old drive.
That seems impossible as the old drive with the OS is either jumpered "cable select" and plugged into the end connector, or is jumpered as "master". Why isn't it seen????

Let's assume the new drive is defective....that would explain why it isn't "seen", but why isn't the old one seen first, thereby allowing a boot? Weird...just weird.

From the information you gave use, to me, it looks like it is seeing the drive, it just doesn't want to see your old drive. With that message, you still should be able to go into the BIOS and see what it has detected(or not)

No OS found...the new drive does not have an OS or anything else on it. As I said above, to test the drive you could run it alone and run the utility, OR you can take the data cable off the CD and try to run the drive from that connection. Just switch it back to master or cable select(the new drive).

A few more questions...Do you have power to the drive? Do you hear it spin up on power up? Was there any unique beeps heard at start-up? What BIOS version are you using?

Don't worry, we will get it working...even with your Archie's collection intact...

Joshuacat

This post has been edited by Joshuacat: 27 May 2005 - 06:20 PM

According to Compaq the computer should see it.

HP and Compaq Desktop PCs - Installing or Replacing a Hard Drive/.

That's specific to your computer and it says to look in the Bios to make sure its recognized. So thats a prerequisite. When you hilight Primary IDE Controller in the Bios with the arrow keys are you then using the page up/page down keys to change your options?

Then you boot with a bootdisk or MaxBlast, Fdisk and Format.

Don't you just looooooooooooove Compaq's???