System won't boot boot with dual hard drives

[AlexK]

I am dumb founded here so help me out guys. I was running win98 while I had an old WD8.4Gig HDD. Then I took it out and installed a new WD30Gig HDD, I formated and partitioned it and installed win98 and Win2K on it. Everthing works OK but I left some files on the old drive. Now when I try to install the old 8.4 drive as a slave and set the new 30Gig one as a master the BIOS does not detect any of the drives. I tried reconnecting them several times to rule out the cables and the jumpers. As soon as I disconnect the old 8.4gig drive and leave the 30gig as the only one in the system bios detects it and it boots up.
I've even tried a different approach, I removed my new 30gig drive and connected my old 8.4gig drive as a master. The machine has the same hardware config as when I removed it so it should boot up perfectly into win98 that's isntalled on it. But no, the bios won't detect it now either. How can that be? What's going on here. All I need is to boot back into my old drive and burn the files onto a CD, or connect it as a slave and gain access to it?
Any ideas?

Here is some info:
Motherboard- AbitKT7 RAID
CPU 1GHZ Athlon T-Bird
Old Drive - Western Digital 8.4 Gig ATA33
New Drive - Western Digital 30.0 Gig ATA100

[jharris]

I can't say what went wrong and affected your original HDD, but I've had the same experience. Initially, I thought it might be an 'active partition' issue -- two active partitions upon boot up. However, I think you can boot with two active partitions -- you just can't make a second one active after booting from the first. All I know is my old HDD was affected in the same way as yours, and I was unable to go back to my origainal setup (the HDD couldn't be detected).

Sorry I couldn't help, but if you get a good answer I'd like to know what the cause was.

[Mylez]

I encountered same problem. I dunno what happened.
Hope somebody out there could help us here.

[fade2black]

Are you using the 80-pin ATA66 IDE cable? If so, then make sure that you have the master drive connected to the black connector, the slave drive connected to the grey connector, and the motherboard connected to the blue connector. Imporperly connecting the cable can cause similar problems. I know from personal experience.

[wedor]

Another little item to consider, Western Digitals use different jumper settings for "stand alone master" and "master with slave" be certain you have the drives jumpered correctly.

[glc]

Put the 8.4 on a different controller channel with a standard 40 wire IDE cable and try it. Disconnect the CD drive if you have to - when it's seen you can just copy the files you need to a folder on the new hard drive and pull it and put everything back.

[Smoke24]

If the old 8.4 gig has an OS or any part of it left on it you may have to set it up in the bios to boot to "C" only. I had to do that with an old drive out of a Hewlett Packard 'cause it still had Win 95 files on it. That was the only way I could get it to work. You might give it a try.

[jharris]

What would it mean if the 'bad' HDD was detected in BIOS but not seen by Windows? That's my situation. I have an old (3 years) WD HDD with my previous Win98 OS and all my files on it. Basically, it was my old everything. I tried accessing the data by setting the system up on IDE 2 all by itself and it's invisible in windows. I have tried all jumper configurations without success.

Is there a way to access data from this drive?

Thanks

[jharris]

What would it mean if the 'bad' HDD was detected in BIOS but not seen by Windows? That's my situation. I have an old (3 years) WD HDD with my previous Win98 OS and all my files on it. Basically, it was my old everything. I tried accessing the data by setting the system up on IDE 2 all by itself and it's invisible in windows. I have tried all jumper configurations without success.

Is there a way to access data from this drive?

Thanks

[wedor]

Go to Western's site and download their disk diag program,then run it on that drive.