Second Hard Drive keeps all from booting

[FengTao]

Whenever I connect my second hardrive to the IDE cable the boot process hangs. It hangs before it even detects the primary drive. If I just connect the Primary the system will load just fine. I've checked the jumpers on both drives and they are correct. I've swapped out the IDE cable and got the same results.

I'm running windows 98 and my second hardrive is a Maxtor. I've been running this setup for a little over a year and a half and just started having problems about a month ago. I shut down and the system would not recognize the second HDD. I dsconnected the IDE and reconnected and everthing worked (my thought was the cable had just come partially loose.) It happened again today when I moved my PC to a new room in the house... I have not been able to get the second HDD back up.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Blujacket]

Is the drive being identified correctly in the BIOS? Could also be the drive is failing/has failed.

 

[FengTao]

One of the problems is the sytem locks up before I can even get into the BIOS if I have the drive connected. It does seem to be spinning but it just keeps freezing up.

Thanks for the help.

 

[SYAR2003]

Double check the drives jumpers(one HDD as master/one as slave) and connectors again.

syar

 

[edfair]

Suspect that it is time to use the Maxtor zero fill progrma on the second drive. Then fdisk it again. This with it as the only drive on the system and selected as master.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[AV1611]

I have found at times, especially on my system that I was using the Middle connector on my cable for the Master and the End Connector for the slave. BUT on certain hard drives this doesn't WORK even if you have the Jumpers right. You have to use the End Connector for the Master and the middle Connector for the SLAVE.

AV

 

[jward52]

Did you check device manager to see if your IDE controller is in working order?
Jim

 

[lesgray]

Sounds like your maxtor is done. Don't like the sounds of your problem.

Since you can't get the computer running with it on, your options are limited. Does this drive work on another machine or does it cause a hang just like on yours? If it does come up on another machine, I'd run the Maxtor diagnostics on it -

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

If it doesn't come up on another computer and the drive is still under warranty, best bet might be to RMA it to Maxtor for a replacement.


Les Gray

http://www.creartec.com