setup won't autodetect

[droshky]

hello.

could you please help me out?

my friend gave me a P200 computer, the problem is that after boot up, it doesn't recognize any HD. I went into setup and chosed autodetect but it didn't detect any primary or secondary HD. The computer has 1 master (1.6 G) and one slave (700 MB). The jumpers are correctly set to identify which is the master and which is the slave drive. Power cable is snug for both and the ribbon cables are correctly installed for both drives. I also manually entered the head, cyc and sector info for each drive but still gets the same result.

this is the message I get after bootup....

hardrive diagnostic failed.


any help would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I am thinking of resetting either the system bios or cmos to their default setting as a last resort; is this a good idea.

Thank you for your help.

David

[spondylolisthesis]

Here are some ideas that come to mind:

Maybe the HDD itself is bad. You could try it on another controller, just enable all of the controllers in the BIOS, it wont slow down the boot process too much. If the diagnostic message reappears on all the other controllers, you could try the HDD in another computer as a last resort and to rule out a bad disk controller(s) on your mother board.

If you can get a known good cable from a working system you might also try that because it can be difficult to tell that a cable is bad by looking at it.

Resetting the BIOS shouldn't do any harm as the default settings are usually conservative to make sure you can boot up. It wouldn't hurt to write down what you have now so you can go back later if you want to and try each change one at a time to see which was the problem.

[Paleo Pete]

I'd go with the cable. It's a fairly old system, the CMOS chip might also be bad, but I'd think you would see other problems and an error message if this was the case.

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