Hard drive issue

[jolycu]

I just replaced the hard drive in a friend's computer because her's was full. I've run into an issue I've never seen before and hope someone here can explain it to me. We used the software that came with the new drive (a Western Digital) and just moved everything from the old to the new. That all went smoothly. Then I changed the jumpers and the position on the IDE cable for both drives, making the new one the primary master and the old one primary slave. Booted up and everything was fine. So I reformatted the old drive, then removed it from the computer. I then rebooted the computer and went into the bios and had it detect the drive. But it wouldn't detect it at all! It detected the CD-
Rom drives ok, but not the hard drive. I then tried resetting the CMOS but still no luck. I put the old drive back on as primary slave and now it will boot! Took it off again, and no luck. I even tried using a different hard drive and installed it as primary slave and it also worked.

Now I've got the new drive as primary master and the old drive as primary slave. But if I take out the slave drive, the new drive isn't detected. I've done this same procedure with another drive before this one with the same problems. I thought maybe it was caused by the first drive I used (a refurbished Maxtor and a used IDE cable) so I bought the new Western Digitial and used the new cable.

Does anyone have any ideas what's going on here? It's really got me scratching my head.
Thanks!

 

[dsa1971]

what happens when you leave the hard drives on the cable select setting?

 

[deathwalker]

Go to Disk Managment and see if it will let you initialize thedisk.

 

[jolycu]

Originally posted by: dsa1971
what happens when you leave the hard drives on the cable select setting?

Thanks for your reply.

I have them set up as master/slave, and I didn't think to try cable select. Do you think it would make a difference? It's working now, so I'm going to leave it alone. It's a pain in the you-know-what to move this desk out so I can get to the cables to unplug everything!

 

[jolycu]

Originally posted by: deathwalker
Go to Disk Managment and see if it will let you initialize thedisk.

Thanks for replying deathwalker. I've got both drives working now, as long as there are two of them. If I take the slave off, the primary isn't seen by the bios and it won't boot at all. As I told dsa1971 above, I'm going to just leave it as it is for now. I was mainly just curious if anyone else has had a similiar experience and what the cause turned out to be.

 

[corkyg]

Some drives have separate jumper settings for MASTER W/SLAVE and MASTER W/O SLAVE.

 

[LukeMan]

remove the jumper from the hdd. I had the same problem when I went from 2 drives to 1 drive. I originally had the drives set to master and slave. When I removed the 2nd drive, I was getting hdd errors on bootup, so I couldn't load windows. I removed the jumper, so it was jumperless, and it booted up just fine.

 

[jolycu]

Thanks LukeMan, I'll give that a try next time I'm at my friend's house. Unfortunately, she's in Oklahoma and I'm in Missouri, so it will be awhile!

 

[FlyingPenguin]

All WD drives have TWO different jumper settings for master: Single Master or Master with Slave. HOWEVER just use the Cable Select (CS) jumper setting on ALL drives, it's simpler, and all mobos made in the last 3 years not only support CS but they generally prefer it.