Hard drive probs - help needed.

[J@ck]

Wotcha folks.

Having built two PCs myself, I'm fairly okay with the insides of our beloved beige boxes. However, I'm stumped on this one.

A friend has asked me to fit his new hard drive.

He currently has two drives, a 1.2(spare data) and a 2.1(windows & system). He wants the 1.2 replaced with a new 20 gig drive.

On the ide cable, the 2.1 (C) joins to the middle connector, and the 1.2 (D) is joined to the end one. They are recognised as primary master and slave, respectively.

However, as soon as I remove the 1.2 Slave drive, the system refuses to boot up, yet the boot sequence is configured to A,C,SCSI. It also detects the Primary Master on startup, when you have the option of going to the bios.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why this second drive is needed for the boot up, as all the system software is on C. As the D drive only has spare data written on it, does this point to a Bios setting? If so, what should I be looking for ?

Thanks in advance.

Jack

[[HLnC]Jay-Dee]

make sure that the jumpers on the 20gb drive are set to slave
and check the other one is on master and not cable select or something
if that doesn't work try putting the drives in different positions on the cable :)

[SGT BLADE]

The master drive must always be connected to the end connector! NOT the middle connector of your ide cable.

[[HLnC]Jay-Dee]

well my master drive is on the middle connector :E

[Calzor Suzay]

It depends on the PC what connector you can plug the master drive in, The Dell's we buy at work are extremely picky on what there plugged into but the vast majority of boards couldn't give a crap what it's connected to as long as ones master and the other slave, Cable select is a different matter :)

Back to the original problem :E
It may be that the second HD (1.2gb) is possibly set as an active partition and the 2.1gb doesn't, try using fdisk to see if the 2.1gb has an active partition, also does the 2.1 have any boot sysem files? just a thought...

A fix to get round it although a pain in the ass is to whip out (oooer:naughty: ) the 1.2gb and re-install your OS over the top of the current install on the 2.1, if you do an upgrade it shouldn't affect any settings too drastically and it should make the drive active bootable with system files and whatever else, unless anyone else tinks different?

[Edited by Calzor Suzay on 24-11-2000 at 10:28 PM]

[J@ck]

Success.

It was the jumpers.

Thanks guys.

J.

[PADDYBOY]

M8- you should probably have the 20gig drive as your boot drive and the other for backups and stuff as the 20gig drive is likely to be a good bit faster than the 2.1 and will improve overall system speed