New PATA Drive

[David Kelly]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 01:56:40PM -0700, Doug Hardie wrote:
> I am encountering an issue with a new 160 GB PATA drive.  Its being  
> installed on an old system (Pentium II).  The boot process never  
> really starts.  It gets in the BIOS to where it checks for drives and  
> hangs with the message searching for the primary drive on the  
> channel.  Normally I have that disabled because the boot drive is SCSI  
> but in that situation it just hangs and there are no messages.  This  
> drive is the only device on the channel and it is jumpered for Master.
> 
> I am suspecting that the issue is the drive ATA/100 is not falling  
> back to ATA/66/33 such that the motherboard can properly detect it.   
> Seagate does provide a utility to reset the drive back down from ATA/ 
> 100 but it requires that the boot get through to run the utility.  The  
> drive works fine in a Mac but the utility won't run there.  I can  
> continue to search for hardware that can boot with the drive attached  
> to run the utility or am I chasing my tail here?
> 
> Drive:  Seagate ST3160815A
> 
> Motherboard:  ASUS P2L97 - Manual says ATA/33 only.

I have had exactly that sort of problem with a 160G Seagate drive on old
hardware. And even if it did work it would have only recognized 128G due
to hardware or BIOS limitations.

In the end I swapped an old HD out of another machine that was happy
with the new drive.

A CPU and motherboard that does recognize your ATA100 drive costs less
than the HD. Perhaps its time to upgrade the MB?

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
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Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.