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CD and hdd, why I can't see slave? 1

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nelljack

Technical User
Dec 23, 2001
337
US
I just unhooked the CD drive I thought might be going bad and now I can't see the slave hdd. Why?

Do I need to go into setup and remove the CD drive from the list to be able to see slave hdd?
 
nelljack,

Might be worth you trying various combinations of your hard and CD drives (eg only one connected, both connectors having HD & CD, one hard drive only on each connector) to see exactly what does and doesn't work. If you have one or more defective devices, you need to identify them before you go any further.
 
I understand that and am working on it.

I have done this:
1. Unhooked slave drive cables and got no boot
2. Unhooked C: and went into setup and no hardware was listed at all. I wuit without saving.
3. I just unhooked the CD and now I can't see slave hdd.

Over the past 5 days the PC:
1. booted ok then the next time did not boot. I left it off for a day then it booted but all I got was the "Go into setup" or "go into Network" screen.
2. I shut down and booted and when it came up it began a chkdsk on slave hdd.
3. Today it booted ok. Still doing chkdsk.
4. Shut down and unhooked CD drive. Booted , etc as above.

I am a computer user from 1987 and this new MS policy, etc is a pain. XP means "Xtra Painful" in my opinion.

Well, anyway, I'm dumping XP and going back to 98SE.

I hope someone can point me in the right direction and give me the steps on what I need to do to replace the hardware and OS without too much of a problem.
 
I'm the guy that has had all the problems with the 200GB WesternDigital HD. I took your advice and upgraded all the bios and drivers that I could find for my Gigabyte motherboard and the Promise ATA/Raid card, reloaded Windows XP and had gotten through a day without any problems. On the second day it hung somehow, I wasn't stressing it I thought, but I was playing a java crossword puzzle on line when it froze. I waited for a couple of minutes for it to recover, but when it didn't, I hit the master power switch!

Upon beginning to reboot it wouldn't and it was unable to boot to any of the recovery points that I also tried. When trying to boot to safe mode, it hung at C:Windows\System32\Drivers\mup.sys. I tried the "Fix" on the XP CD and got nowhere.

My solution has been to run Windows 98SE on a 27GB Maxtor HD and slaved the 200GB WesternDigital HD. A poor solution, I know, but even when I get a BSOD or it hangs, at least I can recover without having the whole OS becoming corrupted.
 
nelljack,

We had similar problems recently. Now, my PC has a CD and three HDs. We figured out that the jumpers on each drive have to be set correctly - on each IDE cable with two drives there has to be a master and a slave, and each drive's jumper must be set appropriately. That's our understanding.

If there is a slave but no master on the cable, then the slave won't work - because the master's away, the slave takes a siesta. Doesn't make great technical sense, but I can't find a description of the meaning of master and slave.

A couple of other things you are probably on top of:-

. the connectors on a cable are equivalent
. red line indicates pin 1 - don't reverse the connection

Hope that is a help.
 
Just so you all will know I have 2 new Seagate hdds now, new 98se OS, and all is working fine. I found out the C: drive was going in my old 2 hdds. I thought it was D:. I was very fortunate to be able to get it to boot and backup all my files before it died.

I worked in a computer lab as a teaching assistant and the main phrase there was "Back up often." I can't tell you how many students wouldn't do that simple save function and many lost 300 pages of thesis and had to start over. And they would get mad at us because WE would not get back their work!
 
jom,

For IDE devices the controller on the Master device serves to handle I/O and drive control for both devices, itself and the Slave. Without a Master configured your Slave essentially has no controller board available.

One of the features of IDE is that most of the controller board features are on the drive itself, not on the system as part of a seperate component. So if you have two devices daisy-chained you do not need both controller boards active, so you specify one device as the Master and the other slave so that there is no conflict over which controller is to be used for drive control and I/O.



 
bcastner - so why have I never had a problem using a slave on its own (HD or CD, primary or secondary)?
 
Wolluf
Now I'm confused.
I thought the thread started with nelljack trying to use a single device jumpered as slave.
jom tried the same thing.
bcastner explained why it didn't work.
Are you saying that you can regularly jumper a single device as slave and have it work?
 
wolluf,

If the drive supports cable select, and you use the right cable, I don't think the settings matter. But I never bothered to test it.

 
drdebit - that's exactly my experience - so I wouldn't swear it works with all mobo/bios/controller/drive combinations, but it has worked on machines I've tried it on. Not as a normal setup, but often when I have 2 drives connected, and want to do something with slave alone, I just disconnect the master & stop auto detect for it. Slave always works on its own (always with an o/s on it).
 
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