Reminds me of this post.

dbo wrote on 2021-10-16, 23:45:

Hello! New user here. […]
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Hello! New user here.

• ... but when booting I get "Master Hard Drive failure" (or something along those lines) during POST
• I don't hear the drive spin up (though it could just be drowned out by all the other noise)

...I'm really curious as to what the issue could be. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Welcome.

You say the drive is detected in the bios correctly, This indicates it has powered up. I would try to verify this by taking it out of the computer and putting your ear against it. At any rate that error is not familiar to me. Can you post the exact message?

I'm assuming you are not trying to boot from a drive that has not been formatted and had the system files transferred to it.

You say the drive is detected in the bios correctly, This indicates it has powered up. I would try to verify this by taking it out of the computer and putting your ear against it. At any rate that error is not familiar to me. Can you post the exact message?

The "Auto-detect IDE Hard Disks" page in the BIOS seems to find the disk:

But when I reboot the POST fails with "Primary master hard disk fail / Press DEL to enter BIOS or F1 to continue":

I'm not anywhere near installing or booting an OS from it at that point, really seems to be a HW issue.

As for the PSU - I did open it to clean it, but I didn't see any obviously blown or bulging capacitors in there. There was some kind of weird waxy resin-like substance all over the place though, like dried glue. Not sure if that was supposed to be there or not, or where it came from.

Bad hard drive. If CF works, than its not the motherboard.

You could boot Puppy Linux off a CD-R and check the SMART data of the HDD.
Edit: Assuming the cdrom will read discs of course 🤣. Might want to find a cheap spare from Goodwill or your equivalent, its handy having a Puppy disk laying around and spare wifi/ ethernet cards for troubleshooting hardware.

dbo wrote on 2021-10-16, 23:45:

[…]
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• The BIOS "Detect IDE hard drives" screen finds the HDD with the correct size ...
• ... but when booting I get "Master Hard Drive failure" (or something along those lines) during POST
• I don't hear the drive spin up (though it could just be drowned out by all the other noise)
• The master/slave jumper setting is correct (not that it would matter, the HDD is the only device on that IDE lane)
• I tried different IDE cables, power connectors, etc.; including the same one that's on the CDROM, which (mostly) works

Welcome! I'd guess the PCB on those HDD were still fine so the BIOS could detect their types and C/H/S correctly but their motor(s) of platters and/or heads might be faulty.

dbo wrote on 2021-10-16, 23:45:

Interestingly, the CF-to-IDE adapter works without any issues! So it's not the IDE port/cable per se. Any ideas? The only things I could think of are: (1) all three drives are bad (which I find unlikely), or (2) the PSU is bad? I tried different power connectors, but to no avail. Also, the CDROM works (well, somewhat ... it works about half the time, the other half it just makes weird noises), and I doubt a HDD would need more power than a CDROM. I don't have another machine with IDE ports, so unfortunately I can't test the drives themselves. Any ideas?

Most optical drives need up to 20W, while 3.5" HDD, even high performance 7200 rpm large (137 GB and more) ones, need no more than 10W. Most 2.5" HDD need only 5W.
Therefore if the CD-ROM works fine with the same Molex connector I wouldn't assume the problem is due to the PSU.

dbo wrote on 2021-10-16, 23:45:

I guess I can live with the CF adapter for now, but I'd really like to get an HDD working. Also, I'm really curious as to what the issue could be. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

If you're interested into retro computing in a long term, PATA-to-USB adapters (a 40-pin adapter often comes with an additional power brick for Molex) will be very useful, allowing HDD and ODD to be tested or partitioned on modern computers.

^ Solid advice. I might also add a bootable pci Sata card.
Using modern new SATA drives is really nice, and you bypass any weird issues with the integrated IDE. I have had some boards with just buggy IDE, so a Promise TX150 card ended up being the best option on my Dual Socket 370 P3 (Via).

It was $5 on Fleabay, and suddenly my 120gb HDD limit was gone and there wasn't anymore data corruption!

While you can do a detect of the drive in the bios, can't you set the bios to just autodetect it on boot? If that's the way it's set and still doesn't boot, just ignore this. 😀

weedeewee wrote on 2021-10-17, 08:43:

While you can do a detect of the drive in the bios, can't you set the bios to just autodetect it on boot? If that's the way it's set and still doesn't boot, just ignore this. 😀

Well he says it derects it, but has issues. Has a new bios, early CPU to rule out that issue. At least his CF cards seem stable.

dormcat wrote on 2021-10-17, 03:25:

Welcome! I'd guess the PCB on those HDD were still fine so the BIOS could detect their types and C/H/S correctly but their motor(s) of platters and/or heads might be faulty.

Thanks! Would be disappointing if all three disks are bad, but I guess you never know with these old things.

dormcat wrote on 2021-10-17, 03:25:

Most optical drives need up to 20W, while 3.5" HDD, even high performance 7200 rpm large (137 GB and more) ones, need no more than 10W. Most 2.5" HDD need only 5W.
Therefore if the CD-ROM works fine with the same Molex connector I wouldn't assume the problem is due to the PSU.

I see. Yeah, I'm hoping the PSU holds up 😃

dormcat wrote on 2021-10-17, 03:25:

If you're interested into retro computing in a long term, PATA-to-USB adapters (a 40-pin adapter often comes with an additional power brick for Molex) will be very useful, allowing HDD and ODD to be tested or partitioned on modern computers.

Thanks, that's a good idea. I'll try one of those.

^ Solid advice. I might also add a bootable pci Sata card.
Using modern new SATA drives is really nice, and you bypass any weird issues with the integrated IDE. I have had some boards with just buggy IDE, so a Promise TX150 card ended up being the best option on my Dual Socket 370 P3 (Via).

Interesting, I might give that a try as well. I have an old 2.5" SATA drive lying around that I could use.

Anyway, thanks all, that's giving me a few avenues to pursue. I'll keep you posted!