Recognizing Hard Drive

I need some help. I am getting ready to change my hard drive. The Mpc 4000 will recognize it and sometimes it will not. This does not sound like a hard drive issue. This sounds like a software glitch. Does anyone have any suggestions. I am about to perform surgery.

From my own experience, depending on the type of hard disk, the 4k may need shorter or longer time to detect the hard drive. I replaced the harddisk by a 2,5" drive, 120 GB and it boots up the system very fast. However, if I enter the LOAD page immediately after the main screen shows up, no drive nor the cd drive is shown. After pressing UPDATE 3 times, both drives are available.

Alternatively, I may wait some 20 s after boot-up before entering the LOAD screen. Then all drives are directly shown.

With the original 3,5" harddisk, the system needed longer to boot, but drives have been available directly without waiting any more second.

On a side note, I also installed a cf-reader as a main drive some months ago. Recently, I recognized, that the cd has not been accessable somehow, so I changed back to the 2,5" disk.

So I would state that the 4k is a little picky about drives. Somewere else on this forum I named the 2,5" hd that I use and which works fine. I think it is an Western Digital (WD).

TSR

This is all very interesting. IN my Z4 I disconnected the harddrive and I only use a thumbdrive in the usb port. I was contemplating doing the same with my 4000 but the HD in it is so quiet it is unnecessary.
I don't mind the load time with the HD in my machine. After reading the post above I doubt I would put in too modern a HD. There are so many inexpensive HD's that are 40 and 80gig that are silent...or maybe I would put in a compact flash to ide adaptor.
I have not found the thumb drive to be hotswappable. When I hit update it never seems to read whats on it. I always have to restart the machine. Anyone else notice that?
I wouldn't mind taki9ng out the HD just to make the MPC a little lighter as well.
Cheers,
Ian

PS I doubt it is a software bug.

This could be an issue with being unable to set the CF reader or HD as a master on the IDE chain (the CDROM is a slave on that chain).

There's quite a few CF readers that don't provide for master/slave settings but HDs should have it.

I have a SATA SLC solid state drive in my MPC; the silence, instant startup and lower power consumption is very welcome. It is slower than using the IDE SSD that I tried first but that's no surprise as there's a converter in the chain now. I'm just about to try another converter to see if it works.