XP Won't recognise Primary Slave HDD

[GusofOZ]

I've just fitted an Seagate 40Gb HDD as a Slave to A Dell Dimension 450. I've tried FDISK with a Win ME boot disk and formated the HDD. I've tried Formatting from the XP CDrom in both NTFS and Fat32. I have installed the Disc Wizard from Seagate and for all the above options it did not see the drive. The Bios detects the HDD and donates it the correct 38Gb! The Primary Master is a 10Gb HDD so I don't think the ATA speed is too much of a conflict here.

 

[wolluf]

So the disk doesn't appear in XP's Disk management? Or in Device manager?

When you used fdisk, you did change to second disk?

What if you disconnect original drive, so only have new drive, and boot from ME boot disk, and try fdisk again?

 

[topscribe]

Here are some suggestions off the top:

1. Check the interface (ribbon) cable. While common sense says that, if one drive works off the cable, both should, this is not necessarily so. Not likely the problem, but an easy place to start.

2. Check your drive jumpers on both HDDs. You likely know that your slave should be jumpered for slave. Also, the master sometimes has different jumper settings for single and master.

3. Although, as you said, CMOS recognizes your HDD at the proper size, be sure it lists the heads, cylinders, sectors, landing zone, and write precompensation correctly.

4. Recheck the partition. Boot from your Windows Startup disk and run FDISK /STATUS to make sure it recognizes the partition.

5. Try another known good HDD with your master if one is available. Although it is rare, you might just have a bad HDD.

I'm not sure you'll find the answer here, but these are the fundamental first steps. Butch

"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts"

http://ld.net/?topscribe

 

[GusofOZ]

Thanks Guys, I did all the tricky stuff right, but missed the "Master Single" jumper hurdle. Eventually installed a 30GB HDD but I think it may have been down to that Jumper. I looked too quickly and just saw it as Master and left it at that. Doe.[Blush]