boothard drive
Top result from google landed into a yahoo post. In the answer the poster is saying I can with LiveCD. But the post is about 5 years old and that's like a decade in technology world. So I'm asking again can I start (remind you only start not want to work) a computer without any hard drive?
Also I want to ask can I start a computer with an external hard drive that works like LiveCD?
The #1 sales reason is video, either your own or copying DVD's (may be illegal in your jurisdiction).
Digital photographs can often fill tens of Gigabytes, but you have to be a real shutterbug to fill a Terabyte.
Another use is off-line partitions for backups or mirrors of your boot partition.
Yet another is keeping on-line ISO's of CDRom's, either for production use (developing a Linux Distro for example) or as an online substitute for actually having a physical disk in the drive to allow children's games to run.
I'm adding a new hard drive, a Seagate ST31000340NS. Interestingly, the bios recognizes it as a ST31000340AS, but it was bought as the other number...
If it were me, I would take the sucker out and check the label to make sure it matches what you bought. And if after you get past your current problems if the drive model is still reported as AS rather than NS I would check with Seagate about it.
The ST31000340NS looks to be the enterprise version of the drive and I assume you paid a premium for it. Seagate may indeed sell exactly the same hardware and only change the labels and the warranty periods ... but you should at least get the label you (I assume) paid extra for. No?
Finally figured out that the hard drive needed a jumper set to limit the speed to 1.5gbps so the mobo would recognize it, and the bios DOES recognize it now.
This is supposed to be auto-negotiated ... oh, well. Suppose it doesn't make any difference since the board apparently doesn't support anything better than first generation SATA speeds.
But not windows (using windows 7), using add new hardware or
diskmgmt.msc.
"Add new hardware" is not where I would be looking. I would look in the device manager (run the command devmgmt.msc in a command prompt). I expect you will find the drive listed there. My guess is that it is probably also showing up in diskmgmt.msc and just needs to be (1) initialized (assigned a MS serial number?) and (2) formatted. But WTHDIRK?
Ubuntu livecd recognized the drive
Which is why I expect Windows 7 will also recognize it. I seriously do not see how this could be a driver issue. Any drivers for the chipsets on this motherboard would already be included in Windows 7.
You might have a problem with Windows XP if you used too early a version. Heck, the early versions of Windows XP did not even support a hard drive capacity larger than 128GB. XP was around a long time and went through some changes. But so long as you were using at least XP SP2 you should have been OK there as well.
The only other info I can think of that might be immediately relevant is that the drive is plugged into the fifth sata channel, and the first channel is empty. Is this a problem?
You lost me here. Below is an image of the motherboard from the link in your question. There are only four SATA ports on this board. Why are you talking about the "fifth sata channel"? There are only four SATA ports unless the motherboard reference you gave is wrong.
Are you using the latest BIOS? If not I would get it from HP and upgrade. (It was dated Dec of 2007 IIRC).
Best Answer
The very first IBM PCs would start a BASIC interpreter in ROM if no hard drives, floppies, or other boot media was present. If you had a hard drive in your system, seeing this would scare you, as it could mean your hard drive failed.
When non-IBM companies cloned the PC (Compaq was the first to do that, I believe), rather than include a clone of BASIC ROM, their BIOS would merely display the message "Missing Operating System" - which is what you will see if you power on your system and no bootable device is found.
A few computers had DOS in ROM and would start that (e.g. the Tandy 1000TL) if nothing else was bootable.
To this day, if no hard drives are connected and nothing like a USB drive is connected, and there isn't a bootable CD in the CD drive, you'll see the typical manufacturer logo, and then a "Missing Operating System" or "No Bootable Device Found, Press {something} to enter setup", etc. It's still like this now.
You should. When you install a live distro to a USB drive you are doing just that. No reason why you can't use an external drive in place of it during the install process. As with booting via USB you may need to bring up the BIOS boot menu to select the drive instead of what it tries to boot off of from default.