IDE Hard drive problems.

Schonza

Member
I'm having some issues with my IDE hard drives. One is a Maxtor diamondmax plus 8 30gb and one is Fujitsu MPG3102AT 10 GB. I"m having issues when I hook them up to my IDE Cables on my motherboard. I'm using the same IDE cable as I do for my CD/DVD rom since it has a spare connector, likewise with the power connector. I conntec it all up nice and securly, (only using one of the drives at a time) and it fails to show the hard drives or my DVD rom drive... Any thoughts? I know they are not dead since they were working in another rig not long a ago, I just have files which I need to get off them. Any thoughts?
 
The answer there is obvious. You used the board end of the two device ide cable for one of the drives. For adding a second hard drive the usual method is to slave the second hard drive to the primary and set the optical drive as secondary master on a second ide cable. The end of the cable with only one connector seen plugs into the board itself.
 
Nope, I left the first connection in the board, and the last one in the optical drive, and hooked up the hdd to the one in the middle.
 
It first sounded like you had both... Your boot drive with the OS should be set as master at the end of the cable with a second drive set as slave on the middle connector. When running two ides drives and two optical drives(cd/dvd burners) I have the two ide drives on the ide primary and two optical set up on the secondary.

In your case move the optical to be the secondary master and second hard drive as slave to the host drive. Your drive jumper settings are probably incorrect explaining why they are not seen. The view of two ide drives and a sata drive can be seen here where the Disk Management tool was used to change drive letter disignations. http://img222.imageshack.us/my.php?image=twoexplorerwindowsvm9.jpg
 
Yeah, well the Drive with my OS has no interference or influence on the other two, since it's SATA. I can't figure out the right Jumper thing for my Optical drive, since I can't get it out of the cage due to stripping the head of one of the screws making it impossible to get out. Could anyone tell me where the jumper must be located on a Pioneer 111-D Burner to make it a secondary drive?
 
On the rear of the drive casing you will see a narrow horizontal opening with two rows of small metal pins. The jumper itself is a small plactic cap that covers two of them in a vertical direction. There are three main positions before the two rows recede into an inaccessible area that you are not going to worry about. The MA, CS, and SL or SA postitions represent master, cable select, and slave.

If you are plugging in the end connector on the second ide cable the MA or master position is used. For adding onto a cable with a drive mastered already you would set it the SL or SA for slave. Optical drives are generally restricted to the master or slave positions depending on the position of the cable they are on.

With hard drives depending on the make of the main board or system they use the cable select(CS, CA) position if they are not seen with the master or slave setting. For working with drive optical and other the 4'in'1 phillips/flat head set or precision drivers can help avoid stripping the heads on the mounting screws. To extract the one there a tiny flat head may be able to loosen that up for extraction by turning with a small pair of pliers. You will want to match a replacement with the same thread and length. Usually the packet that comes with a drive is set aside here for spares.
 
I'm completely stumped. It doesn't matter how I set the jumpers, it doesn't work. The HDD as master on the end of the cable and the optical as the slave in the middle of the cable didn't work. Cable select didn't. Optical as master hdd as slave didn't work.. Neither drive will work by itself no matter on the cable setting or jumper setting? :mad: :mad: :confused:
 
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For optical drives you have to remember only to use the master or slave setting while ide hard drives will often work with the cable select position in order to be detected by the bios itself. With no results seen from rearranging the drives and jumper settings your next step would be trying a different or new cable if you currently have a ribbon type or got stuck with a cheap brand round cable that simply is no longer good. A bad cable will stall everything.
 
Another thing to note on the two drives is the size of each suggesting the older ATA66 rather then currently usable ATA100/133 ide type drives available. The older drives will fail to run on newer atx boards since they are no longer supported. The reverse is seen on the newer drives since they are backward compatible from ATA133/100/66/33 for use on older systems.
 
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