After I replaced C: on Windows XP Pro, the D drive frequently doesn't work.

August 20, 2004 5:59 PM

Using XP Pro 2002. Main HDD dies, replace C:, now can't get out of BIOS without unplugging D: (storage). Actually, D: works occasionally, but during those regular operations it sometimes bluescreens and on reboot I get BIOS errors for *all* drives. Wha?

Hi, I'm petebest, first time poster longime lurker?
Anyhoo the system is:
Dell Dimension 8100
1.3 GHz P4
512 RAM
2 HDD, both 120Gb

Basically the original C: drive (80Gb) died, and I replaced it. I unplugged the D: drive, booted, formatted, and loaded XP Pro 2002 onto the new C: drive. Everything going good.

Then, after awhile I re-plug in drive D:. It's listed as "cable select" (and later, "slave") and the computer sees it - no problem except my two biggest directories - mp3 and "web design" - are gone. Little folders like the manually-created "temp" are there.

There's also "system volume information" and a directory called "found.000" which seem to have enough files and memory space to account for what's missing.

Question: how do I get that back? "System Restore" tactics only touch the main drive, C: , which is not a problem. I need to restore D: - and there aren't any instrucitons I can find for that.

So far, D: is behaving but up to now when I plug in D: - things go well for awhile until I try to write to D: or whatever and suddenly the machine freezes and after bluescreening, BIOS can't find anything. All drives (including the CD-ROM drives) are "Unknown Device".

If I unplug the ribbon and power cables from D: , everybody's happy again.

??

thanks.

posted by petebest to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Make sure the jumper on the physical C drive is set to "master" and the jumper on the physical D drive is set to "slave". I don't know if "cable select" actually does anything without magic cables.
posted by Kwantsar at 6:27 PM on August 20, 2004

It sounds like the orignial config was having both drives on cable select. Best to go back to that.

Get the most current IDE driver for your board or delete the current one, reboot, and let windows find one for you. In the device manager theres the IDE controller. Expand it and delete the last one. It should have a name like "VIA bus master" or some such depending on who made it.
posted by skallas at 6:37 PM on August 20, 2004

It sounds like you may have written some garbage to the D: drive as some point in this process (maybe as a result of having the jumper settings wrong). The FOUND.000 is created when the filesystem check detects errors and tries to recover as much data as possible. You'll probably either have to just pull whatever data you can out of there yourself, restore from a backup, or use some data recovery tool (don't know of one to recommend).

Of course that's after you get the drive to actually work when it's plugged in. I would agree that you should just set them specifically to "master" and "slave", as that will work regardless of the cable type. But if you're sure cable select was what you had before (on both) that could be OK.

Go into the BIOS and make sure both drives show up properly there before booting into the OS.

Of course you should make sure the cable's not plugged in backwards, which is supposed to be impossible because of the notch, but you can also tell because the stripe on the cable should match pin 1, which should be marked on the drive.

Also, if the old drives were really old and only required a 40-pin cable, but the new one wants an 80-pin cable, that could be a problem.
posted by mcguirk at 6:50 PM on August 20, 2004

If all else fails...I recently fought with similar issues with my system after replacing the motherboard and one hard drive. After MUCH troubleshooting and frustration, it turned out the IDE cable had gotten damaged. As soon as I put a new one in, everything worked fine.
posted by rushmc at 9:39 PM on August 20, 2004

Also on harddrives pin one is always the one next to the power connector.
posted by Mitheral at 2:02 PM on August 23, 2004

Thanks everyone for the help. I was looking at the jumpers again when I noticed something I hadn't seen before - the molex connectors were numbered in sequence.

Maybe I never noticed before, but for 12 years at least I've just been taking whatever molex is handy and plugging it in to whatever new drive I just got.

Anyway, by making the molex connectors sequential with the drives (drive 0= molex 3, drive 1=molex 4) it worked, and so far it's kept working.

If it fails again with the same freeze-bluescreen-no boot I'll update with something else but for now . . I just have to get my @#%! mp3's back.

thanks again!
posted by petebest at 3:19 PM on August 24, 2004