40Gb Sky+ hard drive in PC.

kevpatts

Hey,

I upgraded the drive in my Sky+ box about 7 months ago (with instructions found here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=194008) and it works fine.

I recently tried to put the 40Gb drive that I took out of the DigiBox into a PC and no PC seems to get past the bios IDE detection with the drive in. Has anyone else had this problem? any hints?

and yes, the Master/Slave is set correctly.

Regards,
Kev

Lump

It's probably got some special software/firmware on it to make it work with the digibox... You'll need to blank it totally, I'm afraid I don't know how.

John

Malafus

Lump wrote:

It's probably got some special software/firmware on it to make it work with the digibox... You'll need to blank it totally, I'm afraid I don't know how.

John

Um, no. Not really. It's just formatted to a special 'Sky' only format. You just need to run fdisk on it and reformat it to NTFS/FAT32... whatever's your poison. I have the 40GB disk from my Sky+ box in one of my rigs.
Does it detect the drive or not? And what do you have it set as? Master, slave, cable select?

kevpatts

It doesn't even get recognised by the BIOS, not even that, the bios freezes and the POST indicator displays on the ABIT A8V motherboard get stuck at '75' which indicated that it's finding all IDE, SCSI etc. drives.

I've treid it in all Master/Slave/Cable Select methods with the same result.

Malafus, how did you get the drive working? and could you tell me the make/model number of your drive?

Malafus

I didn't have any trouble getting it working. I just slid it in, hooked it up (as a slave device) and it worked fine. All I had to do was reformat it and it was good to go.
The drive was a Maxtor...but I cannot remember the model. AFAIK, all the Sky+ drives are Maxtor, but the make and model of the HDD should make no difference at all. Neither will the formatting. The BIOS should detect the drive if it is jumpered correctly.
So either a) the drive is knackered, or b) you have the jumper wrong.
Or possibly c) your IDE cable/slot is borked. Other than that....

Make sure you aren't looking at the instructions for the jumpers upside down or anything... my friend did it recently. Accidently set his drive to "Limit 32GB" and then couldn't understand why his machine wouldn't boot.

kevpatts

I'm very familiar with jumper settings, don't worry. I've built 9 computers recently. the IDE slot is fine and the drive is okay (cause i tried it back in my Sky+ box), so it must be something to do with the drive. Tried it with cables i know are working too.

Any other ideas?

Malafus

For a drive to be detected, it needs; to be plugged into power, to be plugged into a data port, to be jumpered correctly, to be working... anything actually ON the drive is irrelevant to BIOS detection.

I think that's all the requirements, and you say they have all been fulfilled.

Try going into the BIOS menu, and setting the IDE detection settings manually. That's the only other idea I can give at the moment.

Sparky

i stuck my 40gb hdd in my rig a year ago and didnt format, searched the drive and there were folders with names such as 0000000fghr00ey and huge unreconised files, which i presume were the raw satellite video undecoded.

kevpatts

Malafus wrote:

Try going into the BIOS menu, and setting the IDE detection settings manually. That's the only other idea I can give at the moment.

I tried this but I don't know the data for the drive: no of heads, cylinders etc.

Anyway, I just threw it in the bin.
Kev

zuma

You threw a 40GB drive in the Bin!!!

A search of its serial number in the Maxtor website would have pointed you to the correct manual settings!!!!
Or with a bit of research you could have made a close guess!!!

Sparky

kevpatts wrote:

I tried this but I don't know the data for the drive: no of heads, cylinders etc.

Anyway, I just threw it in the bin.
Kev

Ah here, give it to me ill have a good use for it