I tried running a western digital wd300ab 30gb hard drive in my computer. The drive is being detected but is not showing in my computer. :confused: Its also giving a clicking sound. Plz help

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On what cable and what position on the cable did you put it? Then, what did you jumper it as?

The clicking sound is not good, but don't deep six it yet.

I would put it as slav position on the primary ide cable and jumper your new HDD as slave and the primary one as master.

Also if you are on Windows 9x, the new drive may have been formatted using NTFS and 9x will not see it but the drive 'should' be seen in 'My Computer'.

Hi byge, and welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif.

You say the drive is being detected; I assume you mean it shows up in the BIOS, correct?

Has it been partitioned and formatted?

What version of Windows are you running?

Clicking sounds are no good. I'd grab the diagnostic software from WD's website, available here (http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=999).

Fuss tray i tried connect it in the primary cable. The pc booted the western digital hard drive first so i could not load the operating system. I went into my bios setup and it said that the western digital drive was primary 01 and my other was primary 00. The hard drive had been partitioned and formatted. A few days ago it was working fine when suddenly the drive dissapeared from 'my computer. The drive is being detected in bios but not in windows. I have windows xp and 98 installed. Both in which the hard drive doesn't show

Go back into BIOS and go to the harddrive in question and redetect it by double clicking on it or clicking enter with that drive highlighted. Reboot and see if Windows finds the drive again. An alternate method would be to manually set the ESCD which would autodetect all drives on the next reboot then it would set itself to auto again. You could also download and run DataLifeguard from the Western Digital site to test the drive.

Did you add any hardware or programs recently which may have interfered with the allocations of addresses? I had a capture device go faulty and it would make both my optical drives on the secondary ide cable to disappear in WinXP. Uninstall the software and remove the card and the cd drives would reappear :confused:

See what BIOS is set to for first boot device. I have mine to floppy first, cd second and HDD-0 third. Put your XP cd in the drive and reboot. Be sure to 'press any key' when prompted to boot to the cd-ROM.

I agree with both responders who have suggested running Western Digital HDD diagnostics on the drive. Just because the drive appears in the BIOS setup doesn't mean that it is not damaged.

The best place to view the drive and partition layout from within WinXP is from its Disk Management Section and not from MyComputer. Enter diskmgmt.msc in the run box to get there.

I had a similar situation a day or so ago, but with a CD reader.

The drive was being detected at startup, listed on screen and in the BIOS, but then there was a 1+1/2 min delay whilst the BIOS disabled the drive [I think], meanwhile the drive was still displayed on screen.
Once into Windows there was no sign of the drive.

I discovered that this was because the IDE plug had come out of the socket on the drive.
Another symptom of this was that the LED on the drive glowed unblinkingly right up to the point it was displayed on screen, then the LED went out.

Interesting that the BIOS was displaying the drive on screen with the others despite the fact that there was no IDE cable connection.

See it here http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=37442