Hi

My computer can't detect my hard drive

It wont let me go into bios if the hard drive is connected

With the hard drive connected when I switch on I can't get into bios and I only get the LOGO on the screen
any ideas

Hey lakin,

Is this a IDE or SATA HDD? If it's IDE, have you checked the jumper settings on the drive itself?

Hi mad monkeyThanks for your help, but what jumper settings should it be on ?

If you have connected your drive on the end of the IDE ribbon, the drive should be set to master.
If you connected the ribbon in between the first drive and the motherboard, the drive should be set to slave.

The configuration of pins can normally be found next to the pins (MS=Master, SL=Slave, CS=Cable Select), or on the front of the drive itself. The configuration of pins vary between drives, so it's important to check out what it says on the drive. For example:

Hi thanks again, we are using one single ribbon and have the drive set to master. what we have found is that if the hard drive is dissconnceted then we can get into bios if the drive is connected as above then we cannot get past the mothererboard screenand cannot get into bios.
The drive has windows xp pro installed will this make any difference or does it require to be formatted totaly?.
once again many thanks for your help

When it freezes like this, it means that the PC is having difficulty accessing the drive. If you leave it for a while, it will normally make it past this point with None listed as you HDD. It's not a software issue I'm afraid Lakin. Can you give me some more background on this HDD, has it been working on this PC up until now?