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Old Hard-drive defaults to primary drive on XP WTF

S

Stephan28

Senior member
Alright....here's the situation. I had a system based on a 8RDA+ (with XP Pro) and the board took an unexpected nose dive. I replaced the board with an ABIT NF7-S and a new hard drive. Now I want to install the old hard drive in the new computer while keeping the new hard drive as the boot drive with the Operating System. When I did this (new hard drive on longest part of ATA cable set to cable select) and original drive (from old system) on the second connector on the cable (also on cable select)...and I fire up the system......The original hard drive becomes the boot drive with the OS.... in other words the original drive takes over..... I want it the other way around. What can I do?!!?
 
I suppose that would be the logical thing to do now wouldn't it. I just thought that Cable Select was just that.....It knows where it is in the "chain" of command....That's what I get for thinking I suppose. I'll try it out and let you know the results. In the mean time if anyone else has some more ideas/explanations for this snafu I'd like to hear it. Thanks!
 
I just had the same situation with a mixed SCSI / IDE system. The system insisted on booting from the IDE drive when I wanted it to boot from SCSI. The fix was to remove the IDE drive from the boot options in the BIOS. It then proceeded to boot from SCSI and all was well with the world again. 🙂
 
Ok folks this is getting stranger by the moment. I tried everything and every possible combination I could think of to get this to swap around. I set the jumpers on the drives to master and slave respectively....no go...I tried messing with it in the bios.....set it to manual and set each drive to the respective master and slave.... and a bunch of other things and combinations that didn't work either.....Finally in a last ditch effort I decided to set them both back to Cable Select (set the bios back to Auto) and reverse the postions on the IDE cable....placing the old original drive (which I want to be the slave) on the furthest section of the ide cable and put the new drive on the shorter section.....and....VOILA....WTF?!!?

Now.....I noticed another oddity.....My CDRW is on IDE 2 (only drive on the last connector on the cable) and it shows up as Secondary Slave at the boot screen. Is this crazy or what?!!?

 
I don't really want it on IDE 2 with the CD/RW drive. Besides I'm planning on putting the other CD-ROM on that cable.

I have it working now....It's just that it is defying all logic. See previous post.
 
furthermost plug is for Secondary channel by default. And BIOS would assign names to your IDE drives, so you could ve just selected which drive (IDE-0, IDE-1, IDE-2... etc) you want to boot first(Boot Sequence in BIOS), that's all. It's best to put Master drive on Primary IDE Channel and Slave on Secondary, there 2 channels per plug. That way system detectes them quicker, if you leave them in CS(Cable Select), detection takes longer I think.
 
i'm not sure i understand why its "Odd" it makes perfect sense. Liek someone said, the furthest one is ALWAYS secondary, or slave, and first is master. thats why the old drive booted the first time, it was in the first position, when you moved the new drive down, it became master and thus booted to it. As far as jumpers are concerned, alot of times they dont matter, alot of my luck with drives is HDD on the same cable as HDD wont work if they dont want to work. move them to another cable, problem solved. But its working like its supposed to, no mystery here. =)
 
Alright what am I missing here....I can't be this dense?!!?

Connector Assignments and Color Coding: For the first time, the 80-conductor cable defines specific roles for each of the connectors on the cable; the older cable did not. Color coding of the connectors is used to make it easier to determine which connector goes with each device:
Blue: The blue connector attaches to the host (motherboard or controller).
Gray: The gray connector is in the middle of the cable, and goes to any slave (device 1) drive if present on the channel.
Black: The black connector is at the opposite end from the host connector and goes to the master drive (device 0), or a single drive if only one is used.

Currently what is coming up as the master is on the GREY connector....the slave on the BLACK.......BASSACKWARDS

In the BIOS it lists the drive that is on the grey connector (slave connector) as the master as well

Even the cable is labeled MASTER....where the drive that is coming up as slave is connected and visa versa.


 
Originally posted by: Stephan28
Is this bizarre or what?!!?
Click to expand...

That's XP.

>Black: The black connector is at the opposite end from the host connector and goes to the master drive (device 0), or a single drive if only one is used.

Yes, that's what I thought I knew, and I thought I must have taken a trip through the twilight zone when two people said it was the opposite.

I mess with and redo my several computer constantly, so I have had a lot of mysteries like this, especially since XP. For instance I have several versons of XP on each HD, and sometimes several HDs. Then I put them in different computers, or on a contoller card, etc. I also have a boot manager involved besides XPs boot manager. And another loader for linux.

>Now.....I noticed another oddity.....My CDRW is on IDE 2 (only drive on the last connector on the cable)
> and it shows up as Secondary Slave at the boot screen. Is this crazy or what?!!?

This I don't get. It is jumpered cable select? May be you have some stange cables?


This is as far as I've reasoned it out: The key is that XP has its own internal method of identifyng drives. It doesn't slavishly follow what the BIOS says or where it is on the cable. (Athough it does if all HDs are blank and XP has never been installed on any.) The other important fact is that it has a boot loader. If you put more than one version of XP on a HD, you will see it. Otherwise, it is there, but you probably won't notice.
XP's boot manager uses BOOT.INI to determine which version of the OS to boot.

If you have two HDs that have had XP installed separately, both will have a boot strap loader on their boot sectors, and both with will have NTLDR installed in the primary partition. So now the BIOS uses the first HD with a valid boot sector to boot with, normally the primary drive on the first IDE controller, but at some point in the load process, XP switches to its own ID method. Then you may get either version of XP on either drive as the version of XP loaded, and IDed as the so-called C: drive, depending on how you've switched the drives around since XP was installed. My own situation is more complex than this because I have more than one version of XP on each HD.

I admit I haven't pinned down XPs method very well, but I have been astonished at what has happened more than once. I thought about trying to pin it down, but I need a simpler system to narrow down the possibilities, and a way of knowing when the HD is totally free of any ID that XP may use.

To complicate things further, XP allows you to re-label any drive with an letter. It is simple to do with any drive but the boot drive (C🙂 and the system drive (normally C:, but not always). For the boot drive and the system drive, you can edit the registry. That may seem like an interesting possiblity, but I assure you, you will get more confusion if you ever make another change to you HD configuration down the line.

Another thing I have found is that those setup programs that come with HDs sometimes put a partition manager or overlay on the HD when you don't need it. I found this out when I needed to redo the HD partitions, and Partition Magic refused, giving that as the reason.
 
Well isn't that just SPECIAL...... Looks like XP throws all the rules out the window. (This is my first encounter with XP) Yes the CD/RW is on Cable Select by the way.

I really appreciate your in depth answer to my question! Thanks for your help!
 
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