Hardware (PC) question.

September 3, 2004 2:24 AM

My slave (drive) won't work. [More inside]

My flatmate's PC motherboard died & she got given a new one for me (Mr Mac with very vague PC knowledge) to fit. All fine except that I can't get the slave drive (of course that's the one with all our important stuff on) to be recognised.

When both drives are connected the PC won't get past the BIOS screen (?? the one with 'Press DEL to enter setup' at the bottom.)

With just the master I get all nicely booted up in Win2K.

Jumpers are set correctly on each disk. The slave is getting power & spinning. I've tried putting the slave on the other IDE bus - no joy.

Do I need to do anything with the BIOS? Reset it? Set up something with IDE HDD Auto Detection? I probably don't want to boot Win2K & then plug the slave in once that's done do I ;-)

Many thanks in advance - my real computer is away at the moment and I'm desperate!

posted by i_cola to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Yeah - if the drivers are set correctly, first thing to do is to boot into the BIOS setup (ie: press DEL where it tells you) and set the drives to Auto Detect...
posted by benzo8 at 3:07 AM on September 3, 2004

Auto detects Primary Master.

Doesn't do anything with primary slave...
posted by i_cola at 5:04 AM on September 3, 2004

Starting to sound like the drive may be, erm, sick. Do you have another machine you can put it in? If not, set it as the master and put it in the machine on its own - it won't boot (there's no system on it, I assume), but you'll see if it gets passed the BIOS checks and onto /trying/ to boot. If it doesn't, you might have a dead drive on your hands.
posted by benzo8 at 5:17 AM on September 3, 2004

You might try getting one of those $25 USB enclosures and seeing if you can get it to boot in that.
posted by luser at 6:02 AM on September 3, 2004

With just the problem drive (set as master) I just get to the 'Press DEL to enter setup' screen. This isn't good is it? Altho' the enclosure idea might be worth a try...
posted by i_cola at 6:23 AM on September 3, 2004

It's not sounding good I'm afraid... The enclosure's an idea, but if the drive's dead, it'll be dead to the USB-IDE controller too - you'll be able to boot the machine of course, but not access the disk - much like leaving it out...
posted by benzo8 at 8:55 AM on September 3, 2004

Try using the cable select jumper settings on both drives.
posted by theora55 at 9:04 AM on September 3, 2004

Is one of the drives made by Western Digital? My girlfriend had the same kind of problem and the answer was that WD drives often don't like being jumpered to anything but cable select. Try putting both on cable select. Be warned that not all cables actually support this setting.

There's a summary available.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 4:16 PM on September 3, 2004