New Hard Drive Setup Issues =========================== My hard drive crashed and so I got a replacement. I set the BIOS settings to [AUTO] but I wonder if that was the smartest thing to do. The size that it displayed seemed to be a little low. I am wondering if maybe I should have done something other than set the BIOS to automatic determine the settings for the new hard drive. I suspect I did something wrong because when I have tried to install the Ubuntu Operating System it is stuck on 36 % when formating and/or configuring the hard drive. How do I go about making the BIOS hard drive settings by hand?
Auto should be the correct setting. The size will be a little low...take the advertised size (in GB), divide it by 1.073741824, and you will have the size it should display as. If it is smaller than that, there may be an issue with the drive, the cable, or the SATA port. Also, some older SATA1 boards as well as a few OEM boards may have issues with more modern drives.
I do think there is something screwy going on. I have two hard drives in the system. The old slave drive BIOS settings has this: CHS CAPACITY 8422 MB MAX LBA CAPACITY 120034 MB The new master hard drive has this: CHS CAPACITY 8422 MB MAX LBA CAPACITY 8422 MB I am wondering now is that maybe we have gone beyone what the old motherboard and BIOS cand handle for a the size of the hard drive. If so, maybe a partition is in order. What do you think? The Hard Drive is a Western Digital PATA 320 GB WD3200JBRTL ULTRA DMA/100 8MB BUFFER 7200 RPM if I do not get it running today, I think I will try using the old slave drive as the master drive.
Are there any jumpers set on the drive? For ancient systems that can't recognise big drives, jumpers can be used to limit the size of the drive. Make sure they're not being used [the drive label will tell you the correct places for jumbers to be/not be] If no luck with the drive you could always put it in a USB enclosure.
