just booted new system, no hd detected

[Johnnybird]

Help! I just built my first pc and it boots up but does not detect the hard drive thru the bios setup. Also the cd drive light stays on but wont open with button on its front. It is a shuttle ai61 motherboard, athlon 900 slot a processor, 128 mb ram, ibm 15gb hard drive. When do I install the software for the motherboard, assuming I am able to get the cdrom drive detected and functioning? Does this contain the ide controller drivers? Your timely help is appreciated as I will not sleep until I figure this out.

[skhips]

Have you set the bios to auto detect the HDD.

Are you confident about which ide to connect to and about setting for master and slave.

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

[Johnnybird]

The bios was unable to detect the drive. I have the hard drive connected to primary ide channel and cd rom to secondary, each drive is jumpered as master I believe. The ibm hard drive has different master settings with one designated "15 heads" and one "16 heads". I'm not sure what this means but left it as it came, 16 heads.

[rkmca]

Check all the IDE connectors. The "red" stripe is pin1 and should be next to red wire of power supply. CD-rom light on could be IDE cable is not connected properly.

In the BIOS make sure all drives are set to auto detect.

For the HDD, 16 heads default setting is MASTER, so you are ok with that.
Here is link for jumper setting. http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/dtla/dtlajum.htm

Let us know how it goes.

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RM

[Johnnybird]

You are absolutely right about the ide cables, I had two of them misconnected. Hard drive was detected, cd rom works, partitioned and formatted hd, tried to install Win 98 se but kept getting missing file errors on boot-up, mostly .vxd and .dll files. It asked for the system cd but couldn't find them on it. I ended up starting over and taking a chance on Win ME, thinking my copy of 98se was damaged. I'm glad I did so far, but I have had a couple lock ups and have gotten a couple messages about missing .vxd files and .dll's. What's the story with this? You would think with a clean install on a freshly formatted hd you shouldn't see these errors. I'm going to apply the available patches and hope for the best. Thanks for your help!

[Rexa]

Well, that's because u need those drivers for the components in your system. I had a custom built laptop and it came with the drivers on disk from the manufacturer. Go search for those drivers. You didnt get any when u bought the parts?

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RUN AWAY FROM COMPAQS!!!

[Dinosaur]

I do not think that Win98 will find drivers on the CD which came with the motherboard. Those must be installed by running that CD.

Also, some motherboards require a counterintuitive Boot sequence to be set up in the CMOS. The Promise Ultra 100 IDE controllers need the hard drive disabled as the 2nd device, and Promise Ultra 100 enabled as the fourth device.

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Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.