On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 01:56:40PM -0700, Doug Hardie wrote: > I am encountering an issue with a new 160 GB PATA drive. Its being > installed on an old system (Pentium II). The boot process never > really starts. It gets in the BIOS to where it checks for drives and > hangs with the message searching for the primary drive on the > channel. Normally I have that disabled because the boot drive is SCSI > but in that situation it just hangs and there are no messages. This > drive is the only device on the channel and it is jumpered for Master. > > I am suspecting that the issue is the drive ATA/100 is not falling > back to ATA/66/33 such that the motherboard can properly detect it. > Seagate does provide a utility to reset the drive back down from ATA/ > 100 but it requires that the boot get through to run the utility. The > drive works fine in a Mac but the utility won't run there. I can > continue to search for hardware that can boot with the drive attached > to run the utility or am I chasing my tail here? > > Drive: Seagate ST3160815A > > Motherboard: ASUS P2L97 - Manual says ATA/33 only.
I have had exactly that sort of problem with a 160G Seagate drive on old hardware. And even if it did work it would have only recognized 128G due to hardware or BIOS limitations. In the end I swapped an old HD out of another machine that was happy with the new drive. A CPU and motherboard that does recognize your ATA100 drive costs less than the HD. Perhaps its time to upgrade the MB? -- David Kelly N4HHE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ======================================================================== Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad. _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"