Hi,

I am trying to install a 2nd hard drive to my computer. I have plugged in the drive, and tried many combinations of jumper/cable settings but i still cannot get the computer to detect both drives at once.

My primary (OS) hard disk is a Seagate 80gb.
My new hard disk is a Maxtor 250gb.

I need advice on how to set the jumpers and cables.

Cheers
Sian

You're saying that you cannot get both drives to show up in BIOS? Or in Windows?

If it's a BIOS recognition issue, try a new IDE cable, 80-wire. They usually have master and slave positions labeled on the cable. Then just jumper the drives according to the position on the cable. Boot drive probably needs to be master.

Well I cant get both drives to work at once. I can get my master working on its own, and the computer did detect the second drive once, but I cannot have them both plugged in at the same time.

I have tried plugging the black end of the IDE cable (master end) into my master drive, with the grey end (slave end) plugged into what I want to be the slave drive. I also then tried jumper settings, firstly both with "cable select", which in my mind should work, then i set my master drive to master using a jumper, and my slave drive to slave using a jumper. No luck.

Cheers
Sian

go into your bios. see if the m/b recognizes the new Maxtor as a primary slave hard drive. I assume the new Maxtor is formatted and partition(maybe) with the same file system as your O/S(assuming you're using NTFS) Then double checked the jumpered settings on both hard drive and use a new 80 pin ide cable. Many times a faulty cable will cause problems. You don't need cable select at all. Let me know if this works

prim8e,

thanks for the reply, but I didn't check this thread and so I fixed it another way.

I connected the DVD drive as Master, and the OS Hard drive as Slave on IDE0
I connected the 2nd Hard drive to IDE1

EDIT: Took ppl's advice and used a new cable.

It works fine now

Cheers
Sian

Sian,

Thought I would share some info with you.

First and foremost the 80 wire connector is a must have today.

Certain EIDE devices do not work well together due to incompatibility with one another.

Some systems will have two hard drives set up on Channel 0 on the motherboard, and the CD or DVD drive/drives set up on Channel 1.

Furthermore, some systems will have boot issues and recognition problems if jumpers are not used properly.

A tech friend of mine taught me years ago to not mix a "optical" drive such a DVD or CD drive with a hard drive on the same channel as you are doing.

You might try this and see if you can make the hard drives work together on one channel, rather than having one on each channel as you are configured now.

If you use the 80 wire connector, normally the connectors are used as follows:

Blue: The blue connector attaches to the host (motherboard or controller).
Gray: The gray connector is in the middle of the cable, and goes to any slave (device 1) drive if present on the channel.
Black: The black connector is at the opposite end from the host connector and goes to the master drive (device 0), or a single drive if only one is used.

Also, you may have to experiment with jumper settings. On the system that I built I ended up using "cable select" jumper setting for my master and slave hard drives on channel 0. I then used "master" jumper setting for my dvd burner on channel 1. Any other settings of these jumpers on this system would cause the bios to hesitate while recognizing the drives before finishing the posting process.

Note on jumper settings - If you use "cable select", the bios should recognise the drive attached to the gray connector as a slave, and the black connector as a master. This tip will help when you are arranging your drives in your tower whereas you will have the drives stacked properly so you can easily hook up the 80 wire cable without having to do a lot of twisting. Normally, the master will always be on the end of the cable - furthest away from the motherboard, and the slave will be in the middle. Some will say it does not matter, however I have seen quite a few systems that would post faster if the drives were hooked up in this fashion, rather than having them reversed and the jumpers set to master/slave rather than cable select.

If you find that you must have one hard drive on each channel as you are configured now, then you have a compatibility problem. At that point you might consider replacing your old master drive with a newer compatible drive.

Personally, I prefer W.D. over Maxtor, but everyone has their own preferences.

For more info, take a look at the following pages.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id..._Jumpering.htm

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/conf_Cable80.htm

Regards,
rw