Trying to get home for Christmas! If anyone can help, please do.

[wadeco]

Here's the story,

I finished my last day of classes on Thursday, and could not wait to get home to see the family. Unfortunately, I knew I had one last task before I could leave: the dreaded reformat. I won't go into the details of why I just had to reformat and load the new os, but I did. Doing so meant that I had to backup all of the past semesters work plus other things. Knowing all that would extend my stay, I started Thursday afternoon. Everything was going fine until I realized that my BIOS had to be flashed before I could load Win2K or XP, so that stalled me a while (I'm new to this type of thing). I finally got that done (earlier today), but then when the XP disk got through the initial setup, it said that it couldn't find my hard drive. Then just to see if something was wrong with XP, I tried the Win2K disk and got the same message. So, if anybody knows what I'm doing wrong please let me know. I just want to get home for Christmas. Thanks.

Details:

mobo - BP6 Socket 370 dual celeron - flashed with latest bios (BP6_RU.bin)

OS Win2K or WinXP (I don't care at this point)

HDrive - IBM UMDA/66 15gig

 

[Shaftatplanetquake]

I've never worked with that mobo but have lots of experience installing win2k and winxp.

You need to make sure that you have detected your hard drive in the BIOS. How do you detect a hard drive in the BIOS? You probably need to hit the delete key just as it is coming up. Navigate the menu using your arrow keys and the enter key. Find your say to IDE HDD Detect, or Standard Features, or maybe Advanced Features. It will be self-explanatory what you need to do. Find the Primary master (im assuming this is where your hard drive is set up) and select auto detect. Save and Exit. Once it is detected you should run setup from the win2k/winxp disk (you seem to be running setup just fine) and then getting through that is quite easy.

LMK if this at least gets you past where you are stuck.

 

[wadeco]

I tried that earlier, but I didn't really know what I was doing, so I just ran over to try it again.

When I did attempt to get it to detect it in the IDE HDRIVE DETECTION, it came up with the following restults:

TYPE: 0
SIZE: 0
CYLS: 0
HEAD: 0
PRECOMP: 0
LANDZ: 0
SECTOR: 0
MODE: NORMAL

I'm guessing that all those 0's mean that it isn't detecting anything.
So, then I went into something called STANDARD CMOS SETUP and changed my primary harddrive setting from NONE to AUTO to see if that would work when I rebooted, but still no luck. I went ahead with the new BIOS setting saved and tried to run the setup for XP, but it gave me the same message about not detecting the hard drive.

Currently, I'm re-partitioning and reformatting, hoping that will do something.

Just keeping you posted.

 

[wadeco]

Well, still no luck. I tried all of the above. My BIOS doesn't show my hard drive to have any value, but 0 (whatever that means).
I did try to re-partition and reformat, but that didn't work either.

Wondering if I really flashed my BIOS: I flashed my BIOS, but the BIOS looks the same, same options and all. It also seemed to have the same settings as the original. I think it updated, because the BIOS ID is changed to the new BIOS and I can see it when the system boots. I also get a new screen that occurs after the initial boot screen, and it shows my reformatted, renamed Hard Drive (size and all).

Anyway, still stuck here... guess I'll have to mail my presents home... I wonder how many people will view the forums on Christmas?
Hmmm...

 

[ScottMac]

I'm not familiear specifically with the BP6, but if it has a seperate ATA100 controller (like a Promise), you have to (in Win2K) hit F6, then load the drivers. I'm thinking XP has the same thing...load the drivers up front.

As an alternative, you can put the hard drive on one of the main controllers (Primary/Secondary), load the OS, then load the drivers for the ATA100 controller, then move the drive over between the power-down and reboot.

If you do in fact have a Promise controller, check out their website for the latest drivers and the instructions on how to load 'em up.

FWIW

Scott

 

[wadeco]

Well, that was it. I needed to put the hard drive on one of the IDE slots without the Promise Controller.
Now I have to go and get everything working so I can head home. If I hurry, I just may be able to get home in time for the annual reciting of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.' I can't wait. So thanks guys for all your help. May Santa leave a little something extra in your stockings.

Thanks again. (I'm sure you'll be hearing from me again.)