Is my old comp borked?

[Zoid]

I´ve tried both Master and Slave on both IDE channels. With different cables and with only the big HD connected. I get the same result every time, ie squat. I´ll make one last attempt to fix this by connecting it to my new comp and see if that works.

And if that doesn´t work I´ll introduce it to my friend Sledgehammer...

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by Dr Zoidberg
It seems the storage HD was the culprit here. The system refuses to load with it connected. It works fine with just the system HD connected. Now I just have to figure out what the hell is wrong with the big one... Damn, that´s almost half the value of the entire comp gone if I can´t get it to work...

Tuberski, my boot sequence has always been A, C, CDROM. But thanks for the effort nevertheless

I'm in a job that does a lot of troubleshooting, it's been my experience that you always check the simple things first. Usually it involves whatever you have changed most recently.

Besides, what I said happened to me once.

ACK!

[Zoid]

Problem solved, sort of... But only 31.4 Gb is available of the 120 Gb capacity. I suspect some hardware error since I´ve tried everything else at least 4 times.

[Urban Ranger]

Have you tested it on your new computer?

[Zoid]

Yes and it only showed 31.4 Gb there also. Running Disc Wizard and setting it up as a NTFS drive didn´t help.

[Urban Ranger]

Hm, check the jumpers again. You might have accidentally set the jumper to reduce the disk size.

[snoopy369]

31.4 is one of the 'magical disk limits' ... is it FAT32 formatted? That format doesn't care much for >31.4 gb (oh, saw that you mentioned trying ntfs ... oops) ... if not, then perhaps your bios isn't recognizing it correctly?

I know some people have had problems getting their 2nd disk recognized for >31.4gb ... perhaps some BIOSes are shoddily written and only use LBA for 1st HD?

[Zoid]

UR, no. The jumpers are ok. I checked twice.

snoopy, I´ll take another look in BIOS. I think it´s set to "auto" on all HD´s. Maybe that´s the problem?

[Urban Ranger]

Most HDDs have a jumper to artificially limit the size of the disc at 32GB - as detected by the BIOS - as to accomodate Windows. As you may know, it can't format volumes bigger than 32GB as FAT32.

[Winston]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
As you may know, it can't format volumes bigger than 32GB as FAT32.

Strange, my primary HDD is partitioned into a 20 GB and a 100 GB drive, and both operate without problems under FAT32.

[Provost Harrison]

Are you under XP?

[Winston]

I have XP Home Edition, yes.

[Provost Harrison]

So you're probably using NTFS in fact

[Winston]

No.