IDE hard drive not seen by BIOS [SOLVED]

[iMike]

In brief: I have successfully installed gentoo from gentoo-sources (2004.3) on a IBM Thinkpad 600E with a Travelstar DADA-26480 (circa 1998) 6440MB hard drive. Everything, and I do mean everything, in the setup went great, including the last step of configuring grub and installing it into the MBR. However, when I reboot, I get a screen showing an ascii version of a disk drive with little arrows suggesting that I press F1. If I press F1 it gives me the BIOS error I9990305, which means no bootable device was found.

My BIOS is

[teckian]

The error seems to indicate that your hard drive in setup perhaps as a slave. Is this what your want? Check your master/slave jumper setting if this is possible. Another possible thought is to flash your bios with an updated firmware if it becomes available. It is possible that the existing firmware is perhaps buggy or corrupted in some way. If no update is available, then try re-flashing with the same version or try a previous version. Warning!! This can be a dangerous act if not done properly, or power goes while you are doing it. I recommend using an external uninterrupted power supply hookup. Also never reboot untill all goes well after flash initialization. Your mobo manufacturer should have a readme text about how to go about re-flashing your bios. Hope this helps iMike. If not, try to change the data cable that connects your hard drive to the mobo, if it exist. Also, try installing lilo instead of grub. If that works then the problem is most likely with grub. Try re-installing with a newer version of grub, or even a lower version to what you have now. These are my suggestions. Good luck.
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[iMike]

The drive is the only one is the system, so it should be the master. The jumpers are set that way too, but as an inverse variation of your suggestion, I tried setting it to slave just to see if that would help. Still no go.

I like your suggestion about reflashing the BIOS. I'll give it a try, carefully, as you suggest.

Trying to change the data cable that connects the HD to the mobo might be an option. I have never opened up the Thinkpad to see exactly how they cable it. I'll take that as a last resort.

I did try installing LILO instead of grub earlier, but it didn't make a difference. If the reflash of the BIOS doesn't make any difference, I'll retry LILO and or try different versions of grub as you suggested.

Thanks for the advice! I will post the results.

[iMike]

One new bit to add to this. I tried running the hardware test provided by the BIOS and found that the hard drive is indeed NOT seen by the BIOS! It is a complete mystery to me how the same hard drive is accessable when booted from the CDROM! This lends some support to the theory that perhaps the drive is acting like a slave (even though it is not jumpered that way) and is so only visible when the machine is booted from the CDROM (the master???. I don't know. Strange!

The lesson I have learned. Always check the hardware first!

It seems like this should be in the installation handbook. I know enough to do it when I'm taking junk parts and rolling my own machine, but in this case, I was the only previous owner of the drive and since it acted perfectly through the entire installation process, I never thought to make sure BIOS would see it. I have another drive to try in this machine. I'll let you know what it does.

[ronmon]

The Linux kernel does not depend on the BIOS to detect IDE drives. That's the reason you could run new, large HDD's on an old BIOS under Linux while Win95 could only see the first 8GB or whatever the limitation was. Since the live CD works and installation goes well, that would be my guess as to where the problem is.

I'd double check the drive's settings in BIOS and select or unselect the options such as LBA or Large, etc. You'll probably have to experiment.
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[iMike]

Thanks for the clarification. I did a bit more reading on the Web about the role of BIOS vs the Kernel and I'm starting to understand it better now. If you have a really good link or other source, I would be interested.

As for the particular BIOS (newest from IBM) on my ThinkPad 600E, it did not, unfortunately, provide any means of tweaking parameters for the hard drive. So, nor LBA or Large settings. That's a bummer This lead me to wonder whether one can ever find an alternative BIOS to the one provided by the manufacturer, or at least some patches.

It's only a question for my curiosity, however, because I have a newer hard drive in the ThinkPad that is picked up by BIOS and I have been able to proceed with the installation without problem using it.