MDR no hard drives work

[generaldefault]

I hope people are still using this forum
I cannot find hard drives that work for my MDR. I have tried all of the ones recommended by other users and to no avail. I recently purchased 5 IBM deskstar hard drives (I believe mackie used these in production...?) from ebay (they claimed they were new, they were not. different story) I have about 20 hard drives of various brands laying around now. Only one even registers, but only as a backup. The internal hard drive is still working. I have done the bios upgrade and have had other drives work since then, but not any more. I have reloaded the OS several times and secured all ribbon connectors and parts inside. I am sick of purchasing hard drives. I have a pile of them that I won't use anywhere else except my MDR if I can get it to accept any of them.

I am thinking it must be the recorder. I am wondering if it is the drive bay or motherboard or....? Any suggestions

PLEASE HELP

[Y-my-R]

A couple of first questions:

What BIOS upgrade are you talking about? Large Harddrive, or HDR conversion or both?

Are these all IDE harddrives?
What are their sizes?

Before I try to explain - do you know what the jumpers next to the IDE connector on the hard-drives do? (if so, did you set them properly to Master/Slave or Cable Select?)

What about the LBA setting - did you try with this on and off in the BIOS? (or do you not have access to the BIOS b/c it's an MDR w/o the ability to connect a monitor, that wasn't upgraded to HDR?)

When did the problem start? By any chance after you upgraded the BIOS?

Did you ever try to upgrade the BIOS via software? Just wondering if this could have put some BIOS settings in a state that won't let it work.

Did the battery go out and your replaced it, by any chance? I think this could also cause BIOS setting changes on the MDR, that you can't reset all that easily, that could potentially result in some harddrives not being recognized.
(There's a way to load these settings back in... but I'd also have to search the forum and/or database to look up how to do this).

So, I think there could be a pretty long list of potential causes (see above). We'll have to systematically check all this and try to eliminate potential causes until we narrowed down what the actual issue is.

[generaldefault]

My BIOS upgrade was for large hard drives
All of my drives are IDE - sizes range from 10gb to 120gb with most being 30gb or 40gb
I've tried many of them with the jumper set to: Slave, CS, and removed
I'm not sure what LBA settings means, so I am intrigued
I can hook up a monitor to my MDR (per Mike Rivers manual "Unauthorized Modifications") but it does not turn it into an HDR
I'm not sure when the problem started. This machine has always been SUPER picky. Whenever I have a chance to pick up a bunch of small hard drives, I've always just tried them all and got rid of the ones that didn't work. But now none of them work.
I replaced the battery awhile back. I will start by hooking up the monitor and reviewing the viewable settings

Thanx a gazillion for your response. I will post what I find in BIOS
Anything else you can think of is greatly appreciated

[Y-my-R]

Great to hear that you can access the BIOS on your MDR - that makes restoring the settings to what they need to be WAY easier.

(As you already know, for that purpose, any video card that fits a slot in the MDR should work… and as you know, you just have to cut a hole in the back of the MDR, where the AT-Keyboard connector is hidden).

Don’t use “restore optimal system settings” (or whatever it is called in this BIOS). That’s not the right settings for the HDR/MDR, and certainly not “optimal” haha.

A list of the needed BIOS settings for the HDR/MDR can be found here:
https://www.sonido-7.com/d8b/files/hdr_and_d8B_new_mb_bios.pdf

“LBA” stands for “Logical Block addressing” and some hard drives need that, to work correctly in the HDR/MDR/D8B. So, you might want to try flipping that one to try what happens.

Also, while drives can be auto-detected on startup, there’s also an option in the BIOS where you can auto-detect the installed drives, and then modify settings as needed - like, for LBA mode, for example. So, you’d go in the BIOS and do the Harddrive detection thing (not in front of it right now, but it’s one of the last choices on the main screen before the save and exit option). It should detect “something” and then you can make the needed changes. When then going back to the first BIOS screen, it will no longer say “AUTO” for HD detection, but “User” and if saving the changes in the BIOS, the MDR will try to boot with the new settings, next time.

As for the Harddrive jumpers… which drive are you trying to replace? The system drive or drives inside the drive caddy?

The system drive should always be jumped for “Master” - no exceptions.

The drive in the caddy, is normally connected to the second (of two) IDE controller in the HDR/MDR (each controller can have one “Master” device and one “Slave” device connected. Cable Select is an attempt to have the computer figure out what’s what automatically… but that doesn’t often work out).
Typically, you’d want to have the drive in the caddy jumpered to “Master” as well… but since there’s not usually any other device connected to the 2nd IDE controller, if it’s set to “Slave” it would likely still work, at least from the computer hardware perspective - but I’m not sure if the MDR/HDR Operating System expects these to be found in the “Master” position, though.

Anyway… from my understanding, any drive you use in the HDR/MDR should usually be jumpered to “Master” (but I didn’t carefully read Mike River’s book… not sure if he makes a different recommendation, there).

So, between making sure the BIOS settings are right, the jumpers on the drives are set to Master, and trying if they’re recognized in the BIOS by trying to detect them from there and trying “LBA” if the Operating System still doesn’t find them, should hopefully help to get these drives recognized.

Best of luck!