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Slave HD frustration

816 Views 5 Replies 4 Participants Last post by raybro, Mar 24, 2004

carbomad

Discussion Starter · Mar 21, 2004

Forewarning... Not a TECH! Really frustrated at this end... Have Gateway 1.4GHz PIV with 60GB ATA 100 HD, other bells + whistles... Recently installed Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 30GB UATA / 133 as slave (desig "F" drive) when problems got the better of me on my 60GB. Thought I formatted & partitioned as per install disk. Initial reboot read Maxtor as "F". (Had "D" and "E" - CD and CDRW). Transferred number of files from "C" to "F" (o.k., I thought). Reformatted "C" and reloaded WinME. Now can't read slave 30GB. BIOS shows Primary IDE as my 60GB Quantum and Primary slave as Maxtor 30GB. Would like to recover files (downloaded sample shareware data recovery program - recovered files <64Kb, so I know they exist) prior to trying to reinstall slave HD again. Anyone know how I can get my system to recognize 30GB HD? Sys Properties Device Mgr shows "Disk Drive" and "Generic IDE Disc Type 47" ("no letter" and "C" designations). BTW - Have Norton 2003 AV loaded - do I need to take off in the interim (does it interfere with reloads)? Thanks much for any assistance!!

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raybro

· #2 · Mar 21, 2004

Some definite confusion on drive letters here. If you have 2 HDD's installed as master/ slave and both are formatted properly with one partition on each, they will appear in ME as drives C: and D: . The optical drives (CD-ROM/CD-RW) will ALWAYS be assigned drive letters following the partitions on the HDD's. Unless you are using some sort of utility program to reassign drive letters, this is the way Win9x (includes ME) handles drive letter assignments.

Did you happen to have a disk in your CD burner when you "transferred" the files to "F". According to what you said in your post, I suspect F: was your CD-RW drive at the time you did that.

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raybro

· #6 · Mar 24, 2004

The new drive is not being detected by Windows. There can be a couple of reasons for this. One... as SacsTC indicates, you may not have the drives jumpered correctly. or, the drive may not be formatted. Or, it may not be getting detected by BIOS.

Before doing anything else, be VERY SURE your drive is jumpered properly and connected to the the IDE ribbon cable AND power connector. There should be a diagram on the drive case showing jumper setup to configure it for slave.

Now lets check fdisk... With Windows running, go to Start>Run and type fdisk then OK. when asked about large disk support, press Enter.

There will be a number of items listed. IF you have 5 choices, type the number 5 and press Enter. Then type the number 2 and press Enter. Now type the number 4 and press Enter. Record the partition info there and post it back here. Or, if you can take a screenshot and post it, that would be even better.

The reasoning for all this... If your new drive is NOT being detected by BIOS, fdisk will have only 4 options because it sees only one drive (option 5 selects WHICH drive to look at). If the drive is connected and jumpered properly, you will have to go into BIOS and set it for autodetect. If you DO have an option 5, that means the drive IS being detected by BIOS but not Windows. This could be because of lack of formatting. The partition info I requested above will tell us about that.

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