Hello All,

I had a old Pentium II 450 Mhz machine, i bought a western digital 80GB hard drive, and when i install the hard drive phsyically in it, (the hard drive has no jumper and defaults to Primary Master)

when i turn on the pc, it won't pass the first bios screen and i can only press F2 and enter the bios and then come out again, even though i have set the boot sequence to cd rom but still it won't

any help wud be appreciated

Thanks and regards...

Mutahir

Are there any other HD's in the machine? Does the new hard drive and your CD-ROM share the same IDE cable? If so, try booting the machine with only the HD connected. Have the BIOS recognize the HD first, then reconnect your CD-ROM.

hello,

there are no other hdd in the machine, cd rom and hdd are on separate ide cables,

i was trying to figure out the head and cylinders to manually enter the values, but tthe hard disk itself says on the cover like this

LBA 156301488

its not written in headings as it used to like heads , cylinders and sectors

any help appreciated, and when i put it on autodetect it takes ages and ages and i have to wait for long and long

thanks and regards

mutahir

Hello daniel,

I manually addedd the values for head, sector, cylinder and its working fine now

Thanks for your advise

Take care

Mutahir

Your system is old enough that it may not see the drive since it's bigger than the LBA spec. 32GB is the largest your system will probably see. Try for a bios update and if that doesn't work, the only other option would be to get a PCI IDE controller card.

[Edit] Nevermind.. you got it working.. good.

Your system is old enough that it may not see the drive since it's bigger than the LBA spec. 32GB is the largest your system will probably see. Try for a bios update and if that doesn't work, the only other option would be to get a PCI IDE controller card.

[Edit] Nevermind.. you got it working.. good.

Get the PCI IDE card... You'll be glad you did, because once you flash your BIOS with a corrupt one or the wrong one, your BIOS chip is gone (unless you have an EEPROM programmer)...