HDD's Dissapeared

D

dan73-05

New Member
Cliff notes at the bottom


Sorry if this has been posted before, I tried searching. I bought a used computer from a guy, he kept his hard drive, that was fine since I have 4. I had to re-install windows for the different motherboard, which was fine. I had it all working fine, with 4 drives in, main drive as master on primary IDE, storage drive as slave on primary IDE, DVD as master on secondary IDE, and an extra drive as the slave on secondary. I decided to put a cd burner in place of the extra hard drive. so i took out the drive and put in the cd burner, and I no longer have any hard drives in the BIOS. the hard drives dont even spin up when they are connected to the IDE. I am at a total loss here, sine it sees the optical drives just fine, but the hard drives are not showing up.

Used computer.
3 hdds one dvd.
tried 2 hdds one dvd and one cdrw.
2hdds dissapeared
can't get them back.

in the process of writing this i tried hooking them up to my old comp to see if it found them, it didnt on the original cable, but the second one it did, so the drives arent dead as far as i can tell.

Im at my wits end and any help is appreciated.
Thanks.
Dan

*Edit: now my opticals are gone as well.
is this a BIOS issu? could it be the motherboard?
 
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well, I cant believe I didn't try it sooner all the drives work, until the one that i installed windows on is connected. ive tried the jumper settings as master and cable select. but when that one is installed the bois doesn't see anything. is my drive shot?
 
Hm... i hope its not a motherboard or bios problem. Are you sure they are hooked up correctly and are getting the power they need? The molex connectors or PSU isn't the problem is it?

So if you put them in a different computer the drives work fine...

Have you tried a different IDE cable? maybe the cable is bad.
 
I tried a different cable, I quickly hooked up the donor computer that they were previously in, and it recognized them in that BIOS. If i leave the cable out of the OS drive, it recognizes the dvd cdrw and storage hdd. when I plug in the OS drive, neither HDD even spins. And its like it sabotages the optical drives
 
I know you said you played with the jumper but that could be the problem, someone correct me if im wrong.. but i think some motherboards will only allow 2-3 IDE devices, i heard this but im not sure (but you tried 1 at a time, i dont think thats it), . Its been a while since i have played with IDE stuff.

You sure the boot drive is Master and the rest slave?

If no one else replies tonight, im sure it will get attention tomarrow... the forums seem to die down at night time :P
 
Ok, I appreciate the input and whatnot. In the BIOS there is a primary and secondary IDE, both have a master and a slave. And earlier I had a hard drive as slave to the dvd player. its an IBM hard drive, there are 4 different configurations for the jumpers. what does it mean by 16 heads, 15 heads, 2GB clip, and auto spin disable?
 
Ive tried that, switching the cables for the primary and secondary. I think it might be the hard drive, since everything works until that one is plugged in. does that sound logical?
 
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