Member Avatar for malcolm mogg

At the tender age of fifty odd i decided to have alook into computers, having never touched one before its a very steep learning curve.I've been at it two months now, built a couple, out of old bits and pieces with reasonable success and strange results at times. However as finances are very limited i have to try to improve my pc and my skills at a very slow pace.
the problem i'm facing now is having purchased a maxto 80GB hdd i find the old gigabyte GA 7IX 1999 vintage motherboard wont recognise it either as a slave drive or primary, with jumpers or cable select. Also when connected slave or master the pc will not go past the setup and shows "primary disc fail" Remove it and she fires up into windows as normal.is it the m/board, maxtor or(most likely ) me, cheers.

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Quick summary tied to the replies: reports the Maxtor 80GB prevents boot and is not usable on a second working PC; asked about partitioning and mentioned controller/BIOS compatibility. Given the drive fails on two different systems and blocks POST, treat the drive itself as the prime suspect and work through checks that separate a bad drive from a simple setup issue.

First checks to run now (no special tools required): power the drive alone and listen — a healthy 3.5" HDD spins up smoothly; repeated clicks or no spin usually means mechanical or power failure. Swap the Molex power lead with another from the same PSU to rule out a bad power feed. Try a different 40/80 ribbon cable and plug the drive as the only device on that cable so the controller has no other device to confuse it.

If the drive still vanishes or causes boot stoppage, try connecting it via a USB-to-IDE adapter or an external IDE enclosure. That bypasses the motherboard IDE controller and lets a modern OS or Disk Utility see the drive as USB storage. If the drive is found by USB but not by the IDE controller, the fault may be controller/cable related; if it is not found at all, the drive is almost certainly faulty.

If the drive is detected, run the manufacturer diagnostics (Maxtor/Seagate utility or SeaTools) and do both the short and extended tests. If the drive fails detection or diagnostics, request an RMA from the supplier and do not open the enclosure (that voids warranty and ruins clean-room recovery prospects). When contacting the supplier, note model/serial, exact symptoms, the fact it failed in two PCs, that you swapped power/cables and tried an external adapter, and the diagnostics results.

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Member Avatar for dcc

Did you format and partition the hdd?

btw...being in my mid fifties I have also joined that exclusive club of Old Farts.

Member Avatar for DimaYasny

if the MB can't recognize the HD, you should look into the manufacturer's website for a bios update. that might update the MB's bios to a newer version capable of working with hard disks up to ~132Gb

Member Avatar for malcolm mogg

thanks for the replies, as soon as the hard drive is connected it wont let you any where near formatting or partitioning . since posting my question i have tried the new hdd in my fully functional PC and the same thing happens, that one has equal size drives ,so iguess its back to the supplier. Anyway thanks a bunch for the welcome folk great to know you're all out there

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