WD20EARS not detected by BIOS. HDD working?

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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I connected a WD20EARS to a K8M8MS motherboard and had similar problems. Not sure who makes the motherboard, I think it’s a Foxconn but Google suggests it’s a Jetway. I had to do two things to get the drive to work with this old MB. 1. Jumper the drive to force it to be SATA I. (See http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/2579-001037.pdf)) The BIOS could see the drive and I could format and install Fedora 14 from a Live CD at this point but it would always hang when I tried to boot the freshly installed OS. 2. Disable IDE HDD Block Mode in the BIOS (Yes, I know this is a SATA drive). (See http://www.techarp.com/showfreebog.aspx?lang=0&bogno=97 for a description of IDE HDD Block Mode.) This stopped the freezing at boot. My guess is that the BIOS doesn’t do a very good job of guessing how much data to read/write from these newer drives. It may make this machine very slow, I’ve yet to test it ‘in anger’, so this may not be a workable solution but I’m one step further on.