hard drives won't auto detect

[crazychicken]

I have 2 western digital drives, a 4gb and an 8gb. I am trying to use the 8gb as my main drive w/ windows and everything.

If i set the 8gb to master and the 4gb to slave (they are both on the primary IDE channel of course , then only the 8gb is detected.

If i set the 4gb to master and the 8gb to slave, they are both found and work perfectly.

If i set all the configurations manually, everything also works fine and the 8gb acts as the boot drive.

What is going on??

please lmk

thanks
david

 

[GregMal]

I'm assuming you already know that WD harddrives have 3 settings (I'm
not counting the "cable" setting)....Only drive, master drive, and
slave drive. Having the 8 gig set as Only drive and the 4 gig as
slave on the same IDE channel might be your problem.
Greg

 

[Techwhore]

You should really consider putting the two drives on different chains though...

 

[crazychicken]

i have the 8gb on master and the 4gb on slave, nothing on single

if i put them on different chains, then they will be incredibly slow because a cdrom will be on the same cable right?

please lmk

david
bump

 

[Techwhore]

nope. If you want your 8 gig to be the main drive (boot drive and most storage) then set that to be the Primary Master. Set the 4 gig as the Secondary master and the cdrom and the secondary slave.

How IDE works is that it can only write to one device on the same chain at one time. So if u put both drives on the same chain u'd actually be taking a performance hit as opposed to being on different chains... the only time where this setup can be tricky is when u throw a burner in the mix... for instance if you're cdrom drive was a burner, according to my suggested setup, u wouldn't be able to burn information from the 4 gig drive, u'd either have to put both drives on the same chain or whenever there was info on the 4 gig u wanted to burn u'd have to move it to the 8 gig...

Having the drives on seperate chains will also help out if u put your page file on the 4 gig

Hope that helps, any more questions LMK