Hard drive not detected in BIOS

[bueller05]

I have an old alienware computer in which i believe the hard drive gave out. While it was in the process of dying I noticed that when I would open certain programs, or try to run disk defragments the computer would freeze and I would hard power it down.

I eventually figured maybe I could reinstall windows, so I used my "alien respawn disk" which reformats the hard drive and puts all the settings back on there that it came with from the factory. It froze about half-way through that process and now I cannot boot the computer into windows, and no hard drive can be found when I try to reinstall windows except a 15mb drive which i assume is my DVD drive.

So i went to the local computer shop and bought a new hard drive from them and came home to try and install it, but it is not recognized in my BIOS or by my windows disk or by the "alien respawn disk" when i try to install windows onto it.

My motherboard is an old Abit AV8
My old hard drive was : Western Digital Raptor Serial ATA, 74GB
My new hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200(rpm?) 160GB
S/N 6VMDJJ54
mY BIOS is Pheonix - AwardBIOS v6 00pg

When I enter my BIOS, I go into the standard CMOS setup utility and I see "IDE channel 1 Master - _NEC DVD_RW ND-3520A" at the top, which is where i believe it should show my new hard drive. The NEC i assume is my dvd drive? So if i select "IDE channel 1 master" it brings me to a menu at the top that says "IDE HDD auto-detection". I press enter on that, but it does not detect anything. Below that it says "IDE channel 1 master - auto (with the option of none,auto,manual)" and below that "access mode - auto (with the option of CHC,LBA,Large,Auto)

Below that are "capacity,cylinder,head,precomp,landing zone,sector" all with values of zero.

I assume all of the wire connections are solid, the only cables I touched were unplugged from my old hard drive and connected right to the new one.

I thought this would be an easy fix, but apparently I was mistaken. Can anyone help me get my hard drive recognized so I can proceed with a windows installation? The new hard drive did not come with any software. I dont have access to windows since my old hard drive no longer works or is recognized either.

Thank you so much for your help

 

[almartin]

If this is a SATA drive then check you spec for the motherboard and see if it supports 3.0 gig or more. Then check your drive and see what it says 6.0 gig or less. If your motherboard is 3.0 gig sata then there may be a jumper on the back of the drive to set it to what your motherboard supports. Install it and let the bios detect it with auto detect.
I take it this is the drive you bought and if it is, then this is a 6.0 gig sata. Seagate ST3160316AS Barracuda 7200.12 Hard Drive - 160GB, SATA-6G, 3.5", 7200RPM, 8MB

 

[bueller05]

As far as I can tell theyre both SATA. they both have the same connectors on the back for the cords.

Unfortunately in my BIOS there is no "enable/disable" that i can find. In the "standard CMOS setup" section which lists IDE Channel 1 master, IDE channel 1 slave, IDE channel 2 master and IDE channel 2 slave" the only options are "auto, manual or none"

in the periperal options menu, SATA is enabled.

I have run the windows XP recovery CD and pressed F6 to install drivers, etc, but even when it finished that it told me it could not detect any hard drives and the installation of windows could not be completed.

 

[bueller05]

If this is a SATA drive then check you spec for the motherboard and see if it supports 3.0 gig or more. Then check your drive and see what it says 6.0 gig or less. If your motherboard is 3.0 gig sata then there may be a jumper on the back of the drive to set it to what your motherboard supports. Install it and let the bios detect it with auto detect.
I take it this is the drive you bought and if it is, then this is a 6.0 gig sata. Seagate ST3160316AS Barracuda 7200.12 Hard Drive - 160GB, SATA-6G, 3.5", 7200RPM, 8MB

Almartin, after checking the number on the new drive its close to what you typed, bar one number. It's ST3160318AS. I will go check my motherboard. I unfortunately do not know how to set jumpers, but I will google it and see what happens. Thank you!

EDIT: After checking my old WD Raptor HDD for jumpers, I noticed that it was set to SSC_DIS. Would that mean I need to get a SATA host adaptor for my PCI slot to run this new seagate that I have? I apologize if thats a dumb question, im not much of a computer guru. Thanks

 

[fzabkar]

Your Abit AV8 motherboard uses a VIA K8T800 chipset.

According to VIA's web site, this chipset integrates two 150GB/s SATA ports:
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/chipsets/k8-series/k8t800pro

Earlier Seagate drives had a 1.5Gbps speed limitation jumper, but I believe this jumper is no longer functional on current models. Anyway, it won't hurt to try it:

http://www.yoreparo.com/foros/files/seagate.jpg