Please help!

I have a strange problem. I had Linux installed on a 40G hard drive. I was having trouble getting the this rather old PC (1999) to recognize the entire drive. Somehow it did.

While I was upgrading to RedHat 7.1 my 40G disk decided to go south. Way south. Now the BIOS does not even recognize a HD exists.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to get this HD recognized by the BIOS again? I have flashed my BIOS with the latest Aug 2001 version. It was a bust.

MB: Gigabyte, Ga-5AX
HD: Maxtor DiamondMax VL 40
BIOS: Award, 4.51PG, flashed to F7(lastest)

sounds more to me like a hardware failure... like the hard drive, the cables... possibly. have you checked the connections inside, tried different cabling, power cables... .etc.

I have tried every kind of jumper settings, cables, etc. Power is fine. Primary Master on Primary bus with nothing else on the bus. Secondary ahs a CDROM. I even put this drive into another computer. It didn't work there either. But, atleast it was recognized as a different drive. Then when the OS booted from CDROM, it showed that the drive had 0 cylinders, 0 heads, and 0 sectors (totally useless).

My smaller drives are recognized by the original computer. But this big one (which used to work) decided not to after trying to upgrade to RH 7.1. What did that upgrade do to it?

I need an upgrade for the 4.51PG too.
Where did you find such a new one, which recognises even 40GB?

Can you please reply to:
adb@vinden.nl

Andre (the Netherlands)

I guess you could try nuni bootloader.

I don't know of anyone using it but it ignores the bios completely

I downloaded knoppix 3.4 (english version) build: 17-05-2004 (the most recent version i think). i burned it with k3b under linux and booted the cd. everything went fine until i rebooted my computer. i get the following message:

searching for boot record from floppy .. not found
searching for boot record from cdrom .. not found
searching for boot record from scsi .. not found

boot failure
insert boot diskette in a:
press any key when ready


i have inserted the boot diskette and started fdisk and it said i didn't have any fixed hard disks present. i'm thinking knoppix destroyed my hard disk! can someone please help me!!

maybe some additional info will help you to find and fix the problem:

1) before i booted knoppix, at boot time i didn't get "searching fo boot record from scsi .. not found" but there was "searching fo boot record from ide-0 .. " and then the bootloader grub started.
2) i mounted two hard disk partitions (under the kde) when is was working with knoppix for the first time, but i forgot to unmount them, maybe that is where it all went wrong?
3) my hard disk is a Maxtor 40GB and my bios is an amibios. that all worked correctly for over 2 years and now, its done with it (especially the hard disk)

if you have any suggestions, please help me, i'm a real computer fan and i want to continue working on, as soon as possible!!

thanks dvgt

I think Maxtor may have a bios on the drive.

Try the maxtor site for a boot floppy.

In knoppix you can build the floppy like this..


dd if=filename.img of=/dev/fd0

Your hard drive died. Buy a new one and start again. Upgrading did nothing to the hard drive. It was just that it happened as it was doing a lot of work updating/upgrading. That's why people advocate making backups. I do.

Have you tryed the drive in a diff. computer?

-Joey

just like joey suggested, I tried it in a different computer (as a slave) and suddenly it worked again: I could see it from there and work on it. After a small week of formatting and reinstalling everything ( + we had some virus problems in our network, so I was offline for some time) I’m back up and running!!

Thanks to all the folks who (at least tried to) helped me!!
This is a great forum!


Ps: I have some more questions for you, joey, that are not really related with this forum topic. I checked out your screenshot and I wonder how do you create such a window (that one on the right top of the screenshot) which shows hard disk available space, total space, cpu information, …? How do you do that? My second question is if the last icon on the first section on the left of your panel namely the quite dark purple icon, is that eclipse?? A java develop environment? What version of KDE do you actually use ?? thanks for answering these questions (you can just mail me the answers as well as post them here)!