Won't recognize two drives

[streittk]

It's been a while...

Was having problems on my machine and decided to slick the harddrive. My CD-RW was also having problems, so I decided to copy the data files onto a 2nd harddrive.

I took the second harddrive from another machine I have set up for my son and put it in the one I was working on. It was already being used as a secondary harddrive so I didn't do anything with the jumper settings. I just booted it up, my computer recognized it as D:\ and I saved my data files to it.

So far so good. I booted from floppy, I formatted the C: drive and loaded my operating system (Win 98SE). Everything was working good. I powered it down and went to bed figuring I just needed to finish loading software and copying back my data the following morning.

Next morning, I powered it up. Got the error saying I didn't have any harddrives. BIOS wouldn't dectect any. None, zilch, nodda. Only way I could get it to recognize the harddrive was to unplug the cable to the secondary drive and power back up.

Anyone ever hear of this? I must be missing something simple here. The only thing I had changed was the order in which it searched drives for booting up. I think it had been set to Floppy, then HD. I changed it so it would try Floppy first, then CD, then HD.

Thanks in advance, Kevin

[comp615]

Umm make sure that it is jumpered correctly. The main one should be set to the Master position in the back, and the scondary one should be set to Slave in the back.

[glc]

If you have a Western Digital drive as your master, it uses a different jumper scheme than others - if it's a standalone master, you remove the jumper - the "master" position is only used when there is a slave present.

Use of 80 wire Ultra ATA cables eliminates this issue - you use Cable Select jumpering and master/slave is determined by which connector you use - blue to controller, black at the other end to master, and gray in the middle to slave.

[streittk]

Glc (and anyone else) –

I worked a bit longer on this last night. The two drives are on the primary IDE. The master is a WD 40 gb. It had the jumper set to cable select (CS) and the cable connecter - - not sure if 80 wire Ultra - - was for the master device. I know this because it was labeled as such on the cable.

The slave that I took from the other PC and saved my data files is a Quantum Fireball 13 gb. It had no jumper and was on the primary slave connecter.

This is what I tried last night: Using the WD40 as the master, used CS jumper setting on the master and tried (one at a time) all the different jumper settings on the Fireball. Computer’s BIOS would not detect any HD. Note: The label on the Fireball is not to clear on how to use the jumper settings. It worked in the other computer as a slave without any jumpers, as it did on when I backed up my data files.

Then I did the same with the WD as master w/ jumper set at “Master with a Slave”. Tried all the setting on the Fireball with the same result.

Then I tried setting it up on my secondary IDE as slave with CD-RW as master. Now BIOS detected nothing on the secondary IDE. Removed the CD-RW and tried botting up with the Fireball as the master on secondary IDE. Nope.

It seems when I built this computer a few years ago I went through similar problems. This may be why I ended up attaching the Fireball to the other computer. Maybe my computer just doesn’t like it.

The only thing I can think to do now is see if it will show back up on my son’s computer again. If it does, I guess I can try to set up my CD-RW on it and copy my data files to CD. Don’t know what else to do.

Kevin