Hard Drive

[Skids]

My other PC won't recognise its hard drive. Why? I can get into BIOS but that says not installed. MS-DOS says invalid drive specification when I try and get onto the c: drive. Cable is fine, drive is set to master, both IDE ports recognise the DVD drive if I swap it over.

[stevie21]

I thought a PC without any hard drive would just beep and not let you into BIOS? If that's correct (and I'm likely to be wrong) then it must be recognising the drive in some way.

Is the hard drive the only thing that's attached to that IDE cable? It's not on a cable where the DVD drive is master and the only bit left is "slave" ?

I'd guess that your hard drive with Windows on it needs to be master in terms of the jumpers on the back and also in the cable selection.

[Skids]

BIOS is not contained on the HD, its on chip memory. The HD is the only thing on the IDE cable, the cable doesn't have a slave connection on it. Its jumpers are set to master.

[Ralph]

It's possible that your Master Boot Record is corrupted, so the computer knows there's a hard disk there but doesn't know to boot from it.

You can run Microsoft's own standard utility to repair this. Since you mention MS-DOS in your question, I'll assume you've booted from some sort of boot disk. At the command prompt, type "FDISK.EXE /MBR" including the space but not including the quote marks. This should rewrite the master boot record and let the PC start up again.

I don't think this causes any data loss, but if you're nervous (and I probably would be!), you could put the disk in another computer and copy all the important stuff off it first. It may not be bootable, but it probably is readable.

[OBonio]

It's not an old PC is it? Old BIOS chips couldn't recognise HDDs above 520Mb or something like that. Not until they supported LBA (logical block addressing).

Your first task is to get the BIOS to see the drive (AFAIK, MS DOS uses the BIOS to access the HDD). Look for BIOS upgrades.

Probably worth trying the drive on another computer.