Hello, i am having problems with my friends pc, so i'll try to describe everything as good as i can, please help me . It all started about 4 months ago, i moved in with my moms friend because she moved to another state and i wanted to finished highschool, and after i while i noticed that my friend didnt use his pc at all, only to check email like once every 4 days, and he had: p4 2.4 dvd drive cd burner 40 gig hd i had: p4 1.8 x2 dvd burner 80gig hd so i asked him if i could use his pc for the time i was here since it was faster, so he agreed, i took his pc and changed the dvd drive for 1 of my burners and switched hd since mine was bigger, re installed windows and all, no problem. But now that i am moving in with my mom again, i switched dvd burner and hd to give him his pc , it all worked fine on my pc and i am using it right now, but on his pc i have the following problem. when i first connected everything it gave me some error that the cd drives were not atapi compatible... so i was going nuts and for some reason decided to switch ide cables "you know, the mother board has 2x holes for ide cable, so i switched the cables on each slot" it stoped giving me the atapi cd drive error, and it detected the hd. i tried to install windows but it showed me that the drive was only 7gigs, i was like wtf? but though the partition just got ruined and i could make the partition bigger later on once i had windows running, but to my surprice it gave me error when i tryed to install windows, it went up to 20% on quick formating and then told me that it couldnt format and that the hdd could be damaged. But what is funny is that it detects the drive as a 7gig hdd but the motherboard sais its 40 , and indeed it is a 40gig hdd, so after that i decided to download "ultimate boot cd" and used the hdd utilities to format the hdd, it also detected my hdd as a 40gig hdd and successfully formated it, but when i tryed to install windows it gave me the same error, after that i thought, well, maybe the hdd is broken, so i bought a cheap 20gig hdd on ebay and did the same again, but to my surprice it also said that the hard drive was a 7gig hd and i cant do anything. Also, if i connect the cable back to the way it was, when it gave me errors about the atapi cd drives and connect each of the hdd and the dvd drive on the same cable , when i go to the windows instalation cd, it shows me a 7gig partition and a 32partition on the 40gig hd, but it still gives error and on the 20gig it shows a 7gig partition and an 12gig partition and i also cant do anything, do you guys know what i can do ? is the mobo broken? should i try different ide cables? please help me :smt022:smt022:smt022
Near the IDE connector on the back of the optical drives is a jumper for Slave, Master, and Cable select. Make sure the jumpers are set accordingly. As for the HDD. you'll have to have a windows boot disk. Once you get a hold of that, run fdisk and delete the non-DOS partitions and then create a dos partition that will use all of the hdd space. After that, run windows format and do a regular format, not a quick one, and then run windows installation. Also check the jumper on the HDD to see if its set up as Master if its the only HDD in the PC.
the jumpers are all in correct order, is just the hdd i'll try fdisk, where can i download fdisk? i've never used it before .
If you're using Win2k or XP) *don't* use FDISK! It comes with earlier versions of Windows and DOS, but is quite limited and annoying, and seems to make unusable lumps of space for no particular reason. Use the formatting program that comes with 2k/XP - it's one of the first things that comes up when installing, and it can be accessed from the console thing on the CD too (can't remember what they call it though). Anyway, this sounds like some weird hardware problem. My PC was moaning about ATAPI errors when I changed the CPU - I think resetting the BIOS fixed it though. Make sure everything's plugged in correctly and maybe you should try resetting the BIOS (there should be a jumper on the motherboard for doing this, or just remove the battery if you're lazy ^_^).
