win xp not seeing harddrive?

[R1V3R5]

So, my brother bought a larger harddrive for his aging pc. I was going to put a clean install of XP on there (that is what he had prior) but when I went to install it, it did not see the harddrive. I assumed it was because the version of Windows XP I have is super old and did not have the service packs already on the disc. I knew (and forgot) about that damn 137GB limit so I went and got a newer release of XP with the service packs. However, while installing that version I get the same damn message about not finding a harddrive. It's an IDE harddrive so I don't need SATA drivers and the bios certainly sees the harddrive. Any ideas?

[SOSTrooper]

Make sure the the jumper setting on the hard drive is on 'master', and cable plugged into the IDE1 connector on the motherboard. If you have a CD drive or DVD drive on the same cable as the new hard drive, make sure the jumper setting on the optical drive is on 'slave'. When you turn on the computer, listen closely to see if you hear the HD spin up ok. Access the BIOS by pressing DEL key during the post screen (or F1, or F2, depending on your motherboard), and see if the BIOS sees the HD in 'Standard CMOS Setup'.

If all those didn't work, and HD spins up fine, then you might have an old motherboard that doesn't support higher capacity HD w/o a BIOS update. Look for your motherboard model number and go to the manufacturer's site and see if the newest BIOS will fix the compatibility with larger HDs. If you give us the name and model of your motherboard we can help you out further when you're stuck.

[R1V3R5]

Yeah, the harddrive is on master. And, no, it doesn't share an IDE cable with any optical drives. And it does show up as "Western Digital 25XX 250GB" in the bios and passes the little test that is built in to the bios. Even if it sees it and labels it as such, you might be right about having an outdated bios. It's a Chaintech 7NIL1, an Nforce2 board, and there does appear to be a more recent bios. That is something I'll look in to when I go back over there.

[R1V3R5]

Well, I went to the Chaintech site and downloaded what appears to be the bios for that board. However, when I unzip the download there are about 20 bios bin files! I tried to update with a few of those and none of them are compatible with that board. I "googled" that motherboard name (7nil1) and found a new bios but that doesn't appear to work either. I get a checksum error stating that bios isn't for that motherboard. So, I can't update the fucking bios because Chaintech sucks ass. Any ideas?

[R1V3R5]

do this, go to control panel, administrative tools, computer management, select storage, then disk management.

you probably just need to format and partition the drive before it starts showing up in windows explorer

Umm.... wouldn't I need windows installed to do this? Because I can't install windows because it doesn't see the harddrive.

[Milkyman]

ha yeah sorry i started answering before i finished reading

have you tried going to the hard drive manufacturer's website? I know that back when hard drives exceeded the bios limitations they had little software utilities that would make the drives compatible.

[R1V3R5]

ha yeah sorry i started answering before i finished reading

have you tried going to the hard drive manufacturer's website? I know that back when hard drives exceeded the bios limitations they had little software utilities that would make the drives compatible.

Actually, that never occured to me. Going to Western Digital's site to look! Thanks!