Bios not Detecting Hard Drive after Reformat

I was getting all kinds of weird Windows errors so I decided to just wipe the thing clean and start over. It was my children's computer and they had put junk on top of junk and I thought it best to just start from scratch.

I ran Fdisk and erased the current partition and then set a new one and made sure it was active. I rebooted and then formatted the drive.

I then booted my computer with my Win ME bootdisk and I noticed that it loaded the drivers into Virtual Drive D: instead of C: I thought something was wrong, but I proceeded to run setup from my CD Rom drive to install Win ME. It got somewhat through the process of copying the files and then would crap out and say it couldn't copy certain files. After rebooting a few times and a few more unsuccessful attempts at installing windows it finally dawned on me that I needed to look further into what the problem might be.

I rebooted and went into my bios and noticed that my hard drive was not being detected. It is set on Auto-Detect (or at least it appears to be) so that eliminated the most common cause of the problem.

My hard drive is an IBM Deskstar 30 GB running on an Asus A7V motherboard with the latest bios with an AMD 1200 CPU. I downloaded an utility from IBM to test the hard drive and it found the drive and all tests were successful. This means the hard drive is fine as far as I can tell. I wasn't seeing any bad sectors when doing routine maintenance with Scandisk before all of this.

Someting I'm noticing is that on booting it seems to set up the Primary/Slave settings and then looks for a hard drive. After I see the terms Primary Master etc. I see at the top what looks like a message from Promise Technology which is the ATA controller saying something about the Bus Master being enabled and then I see the word "Detecting" below and then it does show my hard Drive below this. But as I've said in the bios it doesn't show up and if I look at the boot sequence and cursor down to IDE hard drive it says "None".

When I run the IBM utility which is bootable it will give me the drives that it detects and it shows the following:

00 Primary Master Plextor CD Rom Drive
01 Secondary Master Creative CD Rom Drive
02 PC IDE 0 Master My IBM Hard drive

As far as the physical setup I'm sure it's fine since it has worked with no problems for several months. So this appears to be some kind of configuration problem that can be fixed easily if someone understands the problem. Unfortunately I don't

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Walter Cantrell

With that BIOS, if you press enter when "Auto-Detect" is highlighted, then go back out to the previous menu, it should display the properties for the drive. That's how it works on my A7M-266, and I don't imagine they're too different.
You said it was a promise controller, is this the normal IDE controller or a RAID controller? (I looked on ASUS website, but there's 50 million versions of the A7V available)
Also, make sure that the hard drive jumpers are set to master, and not slave or cable select.

It is a regular controller and not raid. When I hit enter where it says auto and then go back it shows one CD Rom Drive on Primary Master adn then the other CD Rom Drive on the Secondary master. On the Primary and Secondary Slave it still just says "Auto".

How many CD Drives do you have in the system and what is the arrangement of drives on the cables?
It sounds like a jumper is set improperly or a wire is loose.

FDISK should only be used if you are formatting a new drive or partitioning a drive. the following statement by you sort of bothers me "I ran Fdisk and erased the current partition and then set a new one and made sure it was active.

I am not that good with FDISK but this is what you should have done

boot up using the emergency startup disk

go to the C: drive

type in format c: /q (Q is a quick format that just resets the file allocation table as if it was a new drive)

then you install the operating system.

There are 2 Cd drives in the system. I'm 99% sure all the physical parts ie. jumpers, cables, etc. are fine since the system was working fine before the reformat.

I only ran FDisk after I kept having this same problem over and over and I read that as a last resort I could try deleting the partition and then setting it up again.

Their may not be an answer to this. I'm fairly proficient with computers and I've encountered problems that end up going away after I do something that seems totally unrelated. This may just be one of those quirky kind of problems.

I have the same motherboard with BIOS 1.005 and it doesn't show the hard drive in BIOS if it's connected to the promise controller. I think its detection is handled exclusively after BIOS initialization when the promise controller is detecting drives. Either that or Asus was too lazy to implement it in the CMOS options.

A workaround to your problem might be to put the hard drive on the VIA controller and then install Windows. After that, update everything including the latest Promise ATA100 controller drivers and then swap the drive over onto the promise controller.