Strange things with my hard drive

[Pete]

  Can you check your bios/cmos settings?  Some bioses require cdrom drives
to be set to none and others have a cdrom selection while yet other bioses
will work whith auto or none set for the cdrom.  If the hard drive is les
than (8 gig? the bioses limit? or maybe 2 or 4 gig limit?) set up the hard
drive whith the C H S values in cmos.  Usually setting the P I O  and the  U
D M A  modes to auto will work.  There may be a couple of settings like L B
A (larg block addressing) or I think another one called just large mode.  If
your lucky you can set this one to auto. More likely there either an on/off
or check box to check.  I geus what I am really trying to say is check the
settings in bios/cmos for the hard drive you are trying to install.
Depending on what hard drive you have there may be two jumpers to set.  One
for master / slave etc and another one for cylinder limitation.  The
cylinder limitation for example: if you have a bios/cmos whith an 8 gig
limit and your hard drive is 10 gig, you would set both master and cylinder
limitation jumpers.  Some computers wont boot unless the cylinder limit
jumper is set to occomidate the limit in bios/cmos most I have seen will
boot any way so not booting could tell you some thing.  Usually no jumpers
on the cdrom meens slave. Also most cdrom and hard drives have jumpers for:
master, slave and cable select.  You may have a system whith cable select,
in which case set all drives to cable select (CS).  The cable select, this
setting detirmines by possission which drive is master and which one is
slave.  How new are the hard drive and cdrom and how old is the motherboard?
  Pete

> Hell, listers!
> I know some of you, especially Kerry, are big hardware specialists. Hope
you
> will be able to advise something for me this time as well.
> I am putting together a new machine. Whenever I connect the hard drive to
> the IDE0 and CDROM to IDE1, both on master, I get "hard disk failed...",
but
> CDROM is found. However, if I connect hard drive to IDE1 and CDROM to
IDE0,
> both to master, then both are recognized fine. Why is this hapenning? I
> tried these combinations several times, and the same result comes out.
> Can you suggest something?
> Victor