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I have a Compaq 5301 and I am trying to add a slave Western Digital IDE 60 Gig hard drive. When I got into my BIOS for setup, I don't have any
options that let me setup a hard-drive. It is a "chopped" BIOS, Unicore Award BIOS from 1999.

My question is how the heck do I get it to recognize the new drive. Does it have to be the master drive (i.e. the only drive) or do I just
need to get the BIOS upgraded. Of course, Western Digital says call Compaq, Compaq says call Unicore, and you guessed it, Unicore says call Compaq!

Any advice????? Thanks.

Well, Compaq’s web site is about worthless on this subject or for finding any kind of useful info on that model. And they wonder why they are losing market share to Dell… So, I would have to play with the machine on my workbench to be of much help. Have you physically installed the drive to see if the system will detect it automatically? Also, I believe that model will only support up to a 30 GB drive. You may need to install EZ drive (http://www.wdc.com/service/diagnostics.html). Larry

Larry and everyone else, okay here is the deal:

The Western Digital drives that are bigger than 2 Gigs (maybe true for any brand HD), need TWO jumpers. If you play with slave and one of the other combinations, the BIOS will finally recognize it and then you can use EZ install. I am not sure if this was a Western Digital issue or a BIOS issue.

I don't have the specific jumper settings here at work, but I can post it later.

LAST EDITED ON Jun-21-01 AT 08:41 PM (GMT)

All recent (last couple of years) WD drives that I've seen (I see bunches of them in my shop, but not the 60 MB model) require no jumpers if a Master (the drive may have a jumper, but it is horizontal position where it doesn't actually jumper anything and has the same affect as no jumper) and no Slave is present, and one Jumper if a Slave, Master with Slave Present or Slave to a Master. However, this model of Compaq uses chip select C/S, which again is one jumper for a WD. The Jumper settings should be on the printed circuit board. If it is jumpered as Master and there is a Slave on the same cable, it won't work. Believe some of the real old ones needed more than one jumper with some, but not all drives. I would be curious about the jumpers. Larry

LAST EDITED ON Jun-22-01 AT 00:22 AM (GMT)

Here is the setup that works (believe me, two tech heads tried everything else):

Master drive (4 Gig Seagate) is at end of IDE ribbon and has one Master jumper.

Slave drive (Western Digital 60 Gig) is in middle connection on IDE ribbon and has TWO jumpers, one as Slave (Dual) and one as Cable Select. In other words, it is the two right most vertical jumpers (when look straight at the back of the drive).

Normally, just one jumper would be needed as the Slave, but this was a usually case.

Thanks again for the input.

May I ask a dumb question? Have you tried just leaving out the 4 GB drive altogether and making the 60 GB drive the master? I guess I am wondering why are you slaving the new (and probably faster) 60 GB drive to the 4 GB drive?

I would just back up the data files from the old drive, and reinstall your operating system from scratch into the new. I think it would run faster and more reliably.

If you want to still use the 4 GB drive, you could get one of those mobile racks which allow you to hot swap either drive in as a master...sort of a portable hard drive setup.

Just my opinion..

Most Compaqs have a maintenance partition on the hard disk drive which is the equivalent to part of the CMOS on other computers. This would have to be put on the new disk drive if the old one is removed. Larry

>I guess I
>am wondering why are you
>slaving the new (and probably
>faster) 60 GB drive to
>the 4 GB drive?

I wanted to use the 4 Gig drive for my OS and program files and use the new drive for all my data. Plus the new drive is Western Digital and I don't have as much confidence to switch entirely to it. My older drive is 5,400 RPM, but it is a Seagate drive which has been very reliable.

Any other suggestions on how to use the 2 drives differently?

I would certainly trust a new drive more than an old one. In my brief history of using hard disk drives for about the last 20 years, I have found in aggregate that Seagate's have been no more reliable than WDs. In fact, I stopped selling Seagate’s quite some time ago because of reliability problems and RMA snafus. Then I started selling them again… I have come close to stopping WDs as well. Quantum wore out it’s welcome long before selling-out to Maxtor. Miniscribe was actually shipping bricks before they went under (yes, real masonry bricks—the kind you build houses with). As a matter of fact, at one time or another I have stopped selling drives by all major manufactures. I stopped selling Maxtors years ago and recently installed a 30 gig Maxtor in my computer (after some WDs crapped-out). My wife has a 2 gig Seagate in her computer. I have WDs in both of my file servers. If your computer can do ATA/66 or ATA/100, the WD digital drive is going to noticeably faster. So, put a 4 gig partition on the WD or copy an image of the old drive to it and use the old drive to periodically back-up the stuff on the new C: drive. That’s all of my two cents on this subject. Larry

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