On 16 Oct 2005 at 9:09, Wolfgang Rohloff (WH) wrote:

> I have a question to ask about Hard Drives. Can I put a 40Gig h/d into
> a Pentium 3 PC or does it not work. I have been given a 40G drive by a
> friend who upgraded his P4 with a 120G drive. When I put it into my pc
> and try to Boot up I get an "IO Error " message. Does any one have any
> answers for me.
>
> Also When I try to put a 7,5G drive into my P1 I get the same sort of
> error there. What is the maximum size drive a P1 can take???


  Before the OS can access the drive, the BIOS needs to know the drive
geometry.  There are two common ways for this to happen:

1.  You can go into the BIOS setup and have it detect the attached drives,
and then save the parameters so it knows about them for next time.

2.  On many BIOSes, you can set them to perform this detection at every
boot.  (This often needs to be done to support CD and DVD and zip drives.)

  Also confirm that the drives are jumpered correctly for the cable
connectors you're using.  Each channel can have one Master and one Slave, or
two "cable select" IF it's a good cable.  The master should be at the end of
the cable and the slave in the middle.

  Oh, and remember to connect power as well as data to the drive....

  Are these drives partitioned, formatted, and with bootable OS (if they're
the primary master) installed?

David Gillett

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