Hard drive problems

Fionn_McCool

Having alot of problems sorting this.

Last night, i put my pc into a new case, everything went fine.

I have 2 hard drives: 1) Maxtor diamondmax 10 200gb (Master drive)
2) Hitachi 80gb


Turned it on and it could'nt detect my Master drive with the OS, started to freak out a bit.
Opned up the case, everything looked fine, all cables connected in the right places, double checked everyone and the power connections, also double checked that i hadn't changd a jumper settin on the hard drives

Turned it on again, same thing.

No i decided to switch the ide connectors on both hard drives.
same thing again.

Decided then to try it with just the Master drive connected and hey presto, windows loaded up.

Since it worked, i shut down again and connected the other drive again. Once again it wouldnt boot.

So at the minute, i am just using the master drive, and i don't have a clue why the other one won't work, the pc cant detct the master drive when it is connect.

Can someone please help.

tommycahir

are these both IDE drives?

if so you'll probably need to mess about with the jumper settings on them set one as master and the other as slave or CS.

Is the Hitachi 80gb on the same IDE cable as the master drive if so mopve the master drive to the end connector

Are the drives being picked up in BIOS?

Fionn_McCool

tommycahir wrote:

are these both IDE drives?

if so you'll probably need to mess about with the jumper settings on them set one as master and the other as slave or CS.

Is the Hitachi 80gb on the same IDE cable as the master drive if so mopve the master drive to the end connector

Are the drives being picked up in BIOS?

Ya, both IDE.

Allready double and triple checked jumpers, and they're correct.

they are both on the same ide cable, and when i had both connected the master was on the end connection EDIT: opps maybe i hadn't

When the master is connected on its own, it is picked up in bios.

When both are connected, only the slave is picked up, but the master isn't, and the boot up asks me to insert OS cd.

Steffano2002

Could be a faulty IDE cable... Do you have another one handy to eliminate that option?

Teamhair

Is this a newish motherboard? If not, I'd suggest a BIOS update. Actually, even if it is a new board I'd still check with the manufacturer for an update. Otherwise I'd say IDE cable.

Fionn_McCool

Just had another look at it there and finally got it sorted.

Tommychair was right.

Although i was able to boot up no problem from either of the two ide connections when the master drive was the only one in there, it appears that every time i tried to boot up with both drives in, the slave drive was always the one on the end connection.

Switched them around so the master was on the end connection and all is fine.

Never knew that before, being somewhat of a tech-noob, learn somethin new everyday i guess.

Thanks for the help

Steffano2002

Fionn_McCool wrote:

Switched them around so the master was on the end connection and all is fine.

I thought you were doing that all along! LOL Probably didn't read your post carefully enough... IDE cable are colour coded for that reason:

- Blue goes into mobo IDE socket
- Black at the end goes into Master
- Grey in the middle goes into Slave

Glad you sorted it out! I hate having these problems... Yesterday it took me 2 hours to figue out why my new PC wouldn't boot from CD/DVD player... Turns out the CD/DVD player is faulty! Never messed so much with BIOS setiings in my life!