Harddrive question! :!:

I had a Harddrive that was working fine, now, out of no where, the drive doesnt work. So then i put in the windows xp cd into the computer to reformat it and it says that there is no drive on primary master! I know its on master because the pcic on the HDD shows the 10 pins with nothing on it, and thats how it is. What could be wrong? Burnt out? Its about 4 months old.

Is it spinning? Does the BIOS recognize it?

it is spinning, (i think, its making the normal noises) and i dont know if the bios is recognizing it, how do i check that. it probably isnt though.

You should format your harddisk in dos and creat primary partition if you want to
setup window,or logical partition to store data or both of them.
You can use "partition magic" to do this task.and you can check the error what harddisk has and you can fix and create another partition for your harddisk.

Step 1: Have boot disk
Step 2: boot from cd
Step 3: Using partition magic to fix error and create your partition(C,D,E)
Step 4: setup window.

First enter your BIOS. Normally you must press the 'Delete' key at system startup, but some boards have a different option. It should tell you in the first few seconds. Look around for a listing of drives on your IDE cables, or for a boot order. If it has nothing on your harddrive then either 3 things have happend:

1.) Hard drive is dead
2.) Hard drive has a faulty IDE ribbon or is not connected correctly to it
3.) Hard drive does not have power (you thought you had already checked that however)

Get back to us.

well, the hard drive used to be in a modded xbox (its a 120 gig). It was working and now its not. when i connect it to a pc, it should detect it with a program that i use called xboxhdm. The program is booted from a cd from start, but that wasnt working, so i tried the windows xp cd. That cant find the drive either. they both say no hard drive was found on primary. The hard drive that is normally connected to the cable on the pc is connected with the same cable i connect the xbox HDD with. I found out that the bios does not detect it.

Then the drive is probably dead. I would try putting it on the other IDE headers.

what are the jumpers set to?

The jumpers are the 10 pins on the harddrive that can be covered with a black thing, rite? If so, the harddrive shows a picture of the 10 pins and to have it set to master, it needed to not have the thing at all. and thats how it is and has been the whole time.

You can try setting it to CS (Cable Select) but it should work like that.