packard bell; no hard drive

[eetech]

I was working on a packard bell 486 and had windows 3.1, i went to load something else and it all of a sudden said no hard drive recognized. Does anyone have any idea what to do now, and how to get the hard drive back. HELP

[Eeyore]

Bad news could be that the drive has died. When you start the computer press CTRL ALT S or CTRL ALT ESC to enter the BIOS Setup. Make sure the parameters are correct for the hard drive (CYLS, Heads, etc.). It is possible the CMOS Battery is getting weak or dead and the BIOS forgot the settings. You will usually see the computer losing its time if this is the case.

If the Parameters are correct, check the physical connections. Unplug and re-plug the 50 pin cable at both ends. Listen to the drive to hear if it is spinning up. Loud clicks could indicate af failed drive.

If all of these fail to fix the problem, boot with a Startup disk which has FDISK on it. Run FDISK an check if there is a partition shown on the drive. If there is none let us know. Do not re-partition at this point as you will loose all that is on the drive. See Partitioning/FDISK for info about using that.

If you do not have a Boot disk see Boot Disk for instructions on making one with the computer you do have running.

Let us know where this gets you.
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My

Dennis
Politalk

[Robert M]

Was this the entire error message?
Wouldn't it be a good idea to start with the exact message? What was the exact wording? What were you doing just before it occurred? If you don't remember the exact error message, maybe you can do what you did before and maybe it will be shown again and you can write it down.

[steppenwolf]

Originally posted by eetech:
I was working on a packard bell 486 and had windows 3.1, i went to load something else and it all of a sudden said no hard drive recognized. Does anyone have any idea what to do now, and how to get the hard drive back. HELP

what did you load??? software? or a card?

50 pin is scsi 40 is ide

if they are backwards it will fry the computer

probably needs a new battery cost 5dollars i think

cards added can conflict with hard drive card maybe

maybe too much on drive and it needs to be formated ? not sure . do you have a startup or bootdisc>??
www.bootdisc.com



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