First post, by Kampfkoloss
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi Vogons-Retro Community,
I have a rather odd problem, regarding a WD Caviar WD400 Hard Drive I've used as a primary Hard Drive in my Win98-System on a Pentium 3 Motherboard (Intel 440 ZX, Aopen AX6BC-EZ), both connected to a Promise Ultra66 or directly to the onboard Intel IDE-Controller, jumpered as Master.
It just isn't detected anymore. BIOS detection hangs, no hard drive is found. It happened without any typical noises made by dying hard drives.
I've tried several cables (old and new, all known to be working). PSU has been upgraded for a Voodoo 5, it worked before with a weaker PSU so I doubt it is a power issue either. Tests with less power hungry 3dfx cards don't change my hard drives misbehavior.
A test on another, more modern motherboard (Asus A8n-SLI) confirms it is definitely not a size barrier issue (the Aopen AX6BC-EZ detects HDD up to 128 GB just fine).
The Hard Drive was extracted and built into an IcyBox IDE-USB Case for wiping and preparing it for another project. Both Windows 10 and MX Linux (Debian based) detection over USB is fine - the drive showed 3 Partitions (MSDOS file table, 1 Primary, 1 extended Partition with to logical partitions inside). I wiped it both under WinX and Linux with a new msdos filesystem table. After it wouldn't be detected even with a new file system table, I did a "diskpart clean" to the drive over USB. This also had no effect on both retro PCs. Detection over USB is still working though.
In one of my tests the BIOS didn't detect the hard drive, but a windows xp setup (SP3, known to be working) run for testing purposes detected the hard drive and offered to setup a C: Partition and format it in NTFS Format. This worked, but somewhat slowly. After copying the installation files from CD-R and asking to reboot, the system crashed BADLY, it wouldn't even show any video output.
This gave me the idea, that the drive had physical issues. So I've screwed off the PCB an looked if there were any corroded contacts - it was all like new! No broken pins, no corrosion.
I'm am out of ideas. Any idea what I could do - other than swap out the hard drive 😁
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