New Seagate drive 'unbootable'

[lewisp]

So I got this shiny new Seagate Barracuda 120GB drive for my aging PC (may be a clue there). The PC has a 1999 version of the Award 4.51 BIOS. Its a Pentium III 800 with VIA chipset. I have installed XP on the Seagate drive, which runs OK at first, but following the first power-down and reboot the drive becomes unreadable.

Background: The PC has 2 drives installed. One is a 27GB with Win98 and the other a 40GB already running XP Pro, and has been for 3 years. Obviouly this is configured in dual-boot. Both OS's have resided happily side-by side for that time.

I have removed the 27GB drive to replace it with the new one, with the aim that it will becomde the main boot drive. I have installed XP on it clean, and on initial installation it works perectly well. I have tried to install XP on it twice now.

The first time I installed XP, it seemed to work well until I powered off the PC and rebooted. I immediately got 'disk read failure' on boot.

I tried to reinstall XP again, and again it worked well until I powered down. On reboot this time I got a blue screen STOP message from XP, and it would go no further.

Now on reboot the PC hangs at the POST screen and refuses to respond at all.

I have reinstalled the original drive and its all working again.

The Seagate web site suggests I may have a problem with the UDMA settings in the BIOS. So how do I go about changing them, and to what, in an Award BIOS from 1999?

Is there anything else that may be wrong with my system that may give these symptoms?

 

[wolluf]

I'd certainly run Seagate's diagnostic utlity (which should be on their website).

What's the power supply on this machine? When using the new drive, what have you got connected in the way of hard & optical drives? Try running with just the new hard drive connected (ie, no other hard or optical drives) - and see if same problem occurs. If it doesn't, then its the old eliminate the culprit approach.

Is the new drive being correctly recognised in the bios - ie, as 120 (well it will show as less - probably 112)? Though if you've already got a 40GB drive, it should be (ascommon bios limit is at 32GB). It should just be set to auto in the bios settings.

 

[lewisp]

Yep, bios seems to recognise the full disk.

Will try the process of elimination later, thanks.

Any other ideas gratefully received....