New hd not recognised.. [Resolved]

ApeXaviour

A week or so I posted about my hard-drive going kaputt. I got some much appreciated adice off ye and got an IDE drive off komplett.
Well anyway I took the old hard-drive out and put the new one in. Same cables in right places. Turned it on and was pleased to hear the low spinning noise coming from it. So it must have power anyway.
But it wasn't being recognised.. I put in the xp disc and got it to boot from the cd-drive, it started loading up and then when I clicked to install xp it said there was no hard-drive..
Googled it and from what I could find it should be automatically installed. If not then there should be something in setup to automatically detect the hard drive. There isn't.
I have some "dell resource cd" which I found I could boot from also. It had some diagnostic things on it. Had some pseudo device manager kind of menu up then. No hard-drive to do diagnostics on.
Messed around with the cables. Took them out, put them back in.. Turned around the ribbon cable, no joy..
My system is a Dell (shudder) dimension 2400. Any suggestions from you geniuses would be great

Optikus

what size is the drive? what version of XP you running, any services packs installed?

ApeXaviour

160GB, the original was 120..
XP home..
Service packs??
The old hd is gone, binned burned out (literally). Just got this one from komplett today so I assume its as blank as blank can be.

Optikus

Is it even recognised by the BIOS. My advice for you is to replace the old harddrive and update the BIOS you should be able to download a BIOS Flashing tool from your boards manufactuor, if you dont know how to flash BIOS. Im thinking its the BIOS update that will solve the prob.

ApeXaviour

Recognised by the BIOS?... erm when I start the computer it says:
"Diskette drive 0 seek failure
F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup"
In Setup and under the boot sequence the only the floppy and cd-rom drive are recognised.

The old hard-drive is useless. When I started the comp with that in it made some horrible noises (metallic scraping and clicking). In the setup boot sequence it had the hard-drive there but beside it was uninstalled in brackets. Same message as above..

Optikus

Strange how you got it to xp and now you cant even get into the BIOS or get your previous drive to boot, perhaps that old drive is not the problem maybe the board is cos i have never heard of a brand new drive doing what you said and not been recognised by even the BIOS which for some reason you cannot access. Sorry mate but im all out of ideas for this.

SantaHoe

Go back into setup and make sure it's set to pick up the harddrive automatically... exactly where this option is depends on what type of bios your system has, but it's usualy within the first page of options. (pgdn/pgup or +/- usualy modify the settings)
Alternatively there may be an "IDE auto detect" menu item on the main menu (current versions of the Award bios for example).

If it's still not detected, double-check your jumpers and IDE cable arrangement.

As Opti said, there's a good chance your BIOS is too old to support a drive of this size, and there is quite likely a BIOS update that will enable support for it.

ApeXaviour

Ok went to setup and I really couldn't see anything I thought could possibly be referring to the autodetection of the hd. So (and I know this is probably stupid) I turned everything to "on" or "auto" or "yes".. and SUCCESS!. Currently formatting it lol...

Cheers lads (or lassies if that you be, I'll assume lads tho).

Nice one..

Optikus

cool... i glad u got that sorted .. good luck with the new drive.