[SWLUG] boot-up screen

[Justin Mitchell]

On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 14:54 +0100, David Scourfield wrote:
> A friend of mine had a similar problem when he installed a new HDD.  
> When trying to install a Linux OS, he couldn't get it to detect the 
> HDD.  We checked the BIOS and found that it, too, didn't recognise the 
> new drive (I think we checked if the hdd was present in the boot device 
> order config screen and it wasn't).
> 
> Turns out the issue was his MB was (relatively) old and only supported 
> SATA-150 and his HDD was SATA-300.  He investigated and found that 
> although SATA-300 is supposed to be backwards-compatible, his particular 
> HDD model didn't detect the connection and automatically downgrade to 
> the older version.  The last I heard from him is that there's some sort 
> of utility program downloadable from the HDD manufacturer that will 
> alter the HDD's firmware settings so it'll use SATA-150 instead, but to 
> use it he needed to connect the drive to a Windows machine with a spare 
> SATA-300 slot.  I haven't heard from him for a while, so no idea whether 
> he resolved it, or not.

I have had this issue with drives before, a quick look on the
manufacturers website (WD) pointed me to the jumper setting to fix it.