How to get my external hard drive to work with my new computer?

August 27, 2004 7:37 PM

Really this is my last resort. I recently built myself a new computer (Asus K8N-E Deluxe) and everything's fine except I'm trying to transfer my old harddrive to my new harddrive. I had a slave in the old computer (Asus CUSL2 for those keeping score). It's 40GB and has ALL my important data. I think you can see where this is going. If it's plugged in and running, even set as slave, the computer won't boot. Obviously, more inside.
posted by geoff. to computers & internet (13 answers total)

Don't leave us hanging, man!
posted by shepd at 7:46 PM on August 27, 2004

I have a SATA 200GB Seagate Barracuda that's set as master and on the native SATA ports of the motherboard. In the BIOS it shows this drive as "Third Master".

Windows XP SP2 is installed and everything is updated to the latest and greatest drivers. This is a truly a clean, new install (okay I have Doom III on it, I couldn't wait).

First thing I did after getting the computer up and running was go ahead and plug in my old "C:" drive which is a 20GB Seagate Barracuda (I used to love Seagate). I put in as slave and on the Primary IDE slot on the motherboard. Everything went smoothly and I managed to copy the data off.

So I go and plug in this 40GB and after the BIOS boot the underscore cursor blinks and goes down about two lines and just hangs there. Assuming I had it set as master I checked the jumper settings and it was correctly set as slave (no jumper put in at all is slave). BIOS recognizes this drive as a slave drive. I take it out and Windows boots.

Okay so I put it back in and restart a couple times to similar results. I put the jumper cable on "cable select" and still nothing. Finally I just put the jumper on the last setting (which I later find out is a "set drive capacity to 32GB" setting). I boot up and everything's fine! I see everything!

Okay but while Windows was booting it wanted to run Scandisk. So I run Scandisk on the drive and took a break. I come back and it's stuck on "Phase 4". I could do nothing, the computer was not locked up but it would not let me cancel scan disk. So I restart the computer (from Windows) and guess what, the same blinking cursor after bootup!

The drive was working fine before I switched over (I was running Win2k on the other machine). The only problem was that during bootup it'd run scandisk and complain the drive did not have enough space to recover, or something similar. It never failed to recognize the drive or do anything of that nature.

So right now I'm very close to putting back together my old machine, buying a DVD-R and burning a ton of those, but I'd like to avoid that at all cost and I'm throwing myself upon the mercy of the court.
posted by geoff. at 7:46 PM on August 27, 2004

Should have notepadded it. Sorry.
posted by geoff. at 7:47 PM on August 27, 2004

Stab in the dark...
The power supply may not be big enough to handle the load of the two newer drives. I've had this happen with several of the last computers that I've built or helped fix.
posted by togdon at 7:50 PM on August 27, 2004

It's a new 420W Antec power supply that I bought specifically because I thought the 350W that came would be too little. I have two sticks of 512MB 3200 RAM, an Athlon 64 3200 and a GeForce6800 GT... nothing more.
posted by geoff. at 7:54 PM on August 27, 2004

I've had problems like this too, but I usually just play around with the cables (in fear) until it starts to work (and it usually does).

Failing that, instead of buying a DVD-R you could just network the two computers together and copy your stuff off that way, couldn't you?
posted by frenetic at 8:03 PM on August 27, 2004

Why not set the drive as Master? It's the only drive on the IDE chain, right? The SATA ports I've seen have been on their own entirely different controller. Unless, somehow, the SATA ports you're using are on a PATA-SATA bridge on the chipset's built-in PATA controller, but I doubt that this is the case on a board as new as this.
posted by zsazsa at 8:21 PM on August 27, 2004

It doesn't need to be slave, but putting on master produces the same unyielding blinking cursor.
posted by geoff. at 8:36 PM on August 27, 2004

What happens when the drives are set to cable select?
posted by the fire you left me at 10:50 PM on August 27, 2004

Update your bios to the latest version (optional). Buy or use a cable select cable, and set both drives to cable select.

If you want to do a huge data transfer I suggest you put one drive on each IDE controller instead of doing a master/slave thing. Should help performance a bit.

Also, you might have to tell your bios which drive is the boot drive.
posted by skallas at 2:27 AM on August 28, 2004

I have that exact motherboard, with 1 single SATA drive and 1 single IDE drive set up exactly like that, and I've had no problems at all. Are you sure the machine isn't trying to boot from your IDE drive? The IDE drive seems to automatically take precedence over SATA in the boot order - when I hooked up my IDE drive, it tried to boot from it immediately.

The BIOS for the K8N-E Deluxe is slightly weird (to me, anyway). You can select the boot order, but that screen doesn't let you specify which hard drive to use. Somewhere in the BIOS (I can't remember where, and don't really want to reboot right now to find out) there's a screen to set the precendence for the drives. Find that screen, switch them round, and you'll probably be golden.
posted by influx at 2:46 AM on August 28, 2004

Aw yes you had to change the harddrives in order for the boot order to be recognized correctly!

Why this did not happen with my smaller drive I do know, but I am happy nonetheless. Thank you, you guys don't know how worried I was (after the scandisk errors) that I had lost 2 years worth of pictures!
posted by geoff. at 11:05 AM on August 28, 2004

You've probably done this already - but have you checked the IDE cable is the right way up? Has happened to me before (v. embarassing!)
posted by prentiz at 6:20 PM on August 28, 2004