Slave hard drive not working properly.

[Gtrance]

Hello.

My knowledge of computers is limited so I may not be able to describe my problem as clearly as I'd like.

Basically i have Windows XP with 40 GB IDE hard drive as my primary partitioned into 2 drives of 20GB each. I have recently bought a hitachi deskstar 160gb hard drive which i wanted to have as a slave drive purely to store my music and stuff. the hitachi was running off the cable that went into my main hard drive. I was aware that I needed to position the 2 little plastic things in a certain way so that it would be recognised as a slave drive. However on the diagram label showing the different positions there were muliple options - 2 for slave drive depending on 15 pin or 16 pin and 2 for cable ready 15 pin or 16 pin. So first i tried one of the slave positions, booted up the computer but it didnt recognise primary hard drive. (even though my primary hard drive has not been touched). So i turned off the computer and tried the other slave position. Booted up, same problem. So tried one of the cable ready positions booted up and this time everything was detected. got to windows, initialized and formatted the new drive, put stuff on it, everything seemed fine.

But when i turn the computer off and back on sometimes it boots up fine, other times it says primary hdd not found. i turn it off back on and this time it works. Seems completely random and i dont understand as I'm not altering anything so cant see why sometimes it works, other times it dont.

Could my little plastic things not be postitioned properly. If so how come i was able to format and use the drive perfectly well.

Also if i have to change anything will these mean formatting all over again or can i fix this problem without formatting.

If you've read all of this then thankyou for your patience

Any suggestions, advice would be welcome.

thanks

 

[randruff]

A couple things first....What motherboard do you have? One piece of advice I can give is to try putting your slave HDD on your secondary IDE line (along with optical drive, etc). For some reason, your IDE controller could be having problems differentiating between the master/slave on your primary IDE channel. Another thing to consider, which I doubt is the case, but perhaps your IDE cable itself is dying. In the situation where your computer is not recognizing your primary HDD, try hopping into BIOS and see if it is being recognized there.

 

[Gtrance]

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner randruff. I've switched the hard drive onto my other IDE cable like you said and it boots up fine. Had a bit of trouble getting the hard drive close enough to my cd drive so the cable could reach both of them (the layout of my computer seems to have been designed so that everything is blocking everything else) but its all done now and working fine.

Thanks very much for the advice. Its saved me paying someone to have a look at it and I'm sure they'd of said i needed a new motherboard or something. Quite satisfying being able to fix my own computer.

thanks again

 

[joeb42]

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner randruff. I've switched the hard drive onto my other IDE cable like you said and it boots up fine

Gtrance , just curious . Did you keep the 160 gig drive as slave when placed on the other IDE cable ? Years ago I was told that there is usually a fight between drives- the larger always want to be Master.