Unique XP hard drive problem

[dhinge]

Hi, I bought an 80 gig IDE Western Digital hard drive, and installed XP from my old disc. I then slaved my old 40 gig HD (with XP from the same disc) and copied some files over. I then booted XP from the 40 (mastered, with 80 gig unplugged from motherboard), to export my IE bookmarks. When I booted up the 80 gig master, and the 40 slaved to copy more files over, the new XP recognized my 40 gig as C, and the 80 gig as drive F.

I unplugged both, set 80 to master, plugged it back in, and now the motherboard won't recognize it, at all, mastered, or slaved, or anything. The only way I could get it to recognize was to chain it to another drive, like my ZIP 100 drive, or the old 40 gig. On bootup, it recognized the ZIP drive as C, and the 80 as F. Windows doesn't let you change the master boot drive letter through Disk Management, and no viruses were detected in the master boot record using Norton.

The thing that's bizarre is that while the 80 gig won't boot by itself as master, the 40 gig will, and it's recognized as C. I'm having to either chain the 80 to my 40, or to the ZIP drive to get it to work. Not sure if this is a big problem, but it's a pain to install certain programs because they default to the C drive for folder placement. Anybody experience this before or ever heard of it?

I have an ASUS a7m266 with the latest 1007 bios. Thanks!

[Cricket]

Are you using 40 wire or 80 wire IDE cables? For 40 wire IDE cables you use the master/slave jumper settings, but with 80 wire IDE cables you use the CS (cable select) jumper setting and it's the position on the cable that determines drive priority (blue connector to motherboard, black is the master position and grey is the slave position).

Have you tried clearing the CMOS yet?

:) Cricket

[dhinge]

it's a standard 40 wire cable. The weird thing is that the MB recognized the 80 gig drive fine by itself went I went to install XP, it's only when I attached the 40 as the slave, and booted from the 80, that XP set the 40 drive to C, and the 80 to F. So my master boot drive was drive letter F! After that, the MB wouldn't recognize the 80 unless it had another drive attached to it.

[dhinge]

oh yes, and it recognizes the 40 just fine without any other drives chained to it, and attaches it the drive letter C. This is still from my old XP boot. I think XP has somehow messed up the BIOS. (Haven't cleared the CMOS yet, suppose I will try that next)

[glc]

Western Digital drives cannot be set to Master if it's the only drive on the cable - you must remove the jumper for single/standalone operation if you are not using 80 wire cable select - and if you do have 80 wire, you cannot override the drive's position on the cable with a jumper, master/standalone MUST be on the end of the cable, not the middle.