Chosen Solution
When the PATA cable is plugged in the computer boots, but it doesn’t display anything on the monitor and the hard drive doesn’t start at all (it’s not vibrating). When the hard drive is connected only to the power cable it vibrates and it looks like everything is ok (i can access the bios) Motherboard: https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboard… Hard drive label:
Update (07/04/2020) @nick @jayeff I’ve managed to get it working! Thank you very much for all your help
Because this post has come back, here’s a cleaned up answer. Generally speaking, a hanging BIOS is typically due to a failed drive with a BIOS that doesn’t handle a failed hard drive well, or it’s a legacy system which requires manual cylinder/head data to determine the type or it hangs every time. Since your system is from ~1996 with Socket 7, you are going to be dealing with a 28-bit LBA BIOS which is limited to 128GB. In your case, your practical limit is 120GB< as there are no IDE 128GB drives you want. Any IDE SSD you buy will often be junk and need adaptation anyway which is shoddy at best. With many legacy systems like that, you have to know which “type” your drive is, especially if the automatic detection does not work, or it wasn’t added (yes, this was still a problem for a few years). Generally speaking, you either have to do a custom LBA setup, or select a drive Type predetermined by the BIOS, especially with faulty autodetection. The issue we run into now with these is it hasn’t been printed on drives in years simply due to the fact that it’s not as necessary today. In order to find it, it is based on the Hard Disk Cylinders and Heads (Sectors are often calculated from those numbers). This data is normally entered into the system BIOS under the IDE section, which is how it determines the type or labels it as a custom drive outright. See the screenshot for an example of what this data looks like:
You can grab it with a program like Hard Disk Sentinel, but you need an adapter like this to get it. If you use a CF to IDE, the conversion is NOT automatic like the ATA standard, so you need to do the math yourself. Thankfully, most CF cards are small enough the BIOSes don’t struggle but it is something to keep in mind.
what is your model of your computer’? Sounds like the hard disk might be having issues to get detected in the computer, thus causing this “freezing” suggest you to take this hard disk out and test it
- on a docking / enclosure
- on another computer, set the hard disk to slave, and observe it it stalls too on another computer.
