Musical Hard Drives (HDD problem)

I am haveing problems with my hard drives. I have two hard drives one is a 2GB and the other is a 1GB I also have a FDD and a CD-ROM.

On my first ATA cable I pluged in my 2GB hard drive with the origional jumper settings.

On the second plug on the same master cable I have my CD-ROM pluged in.

On my second ATA cable slot I have my 1MB hard drive pluged in with the jumper settings set for master/standalone.

So acording to my setup my C drive or pri master is my 2MB drive, my pri slave is my CD-ROM (D drive) and my secondary master/standalone is my 1MB hard drive.

My problem is I cannot get my second hard drive (1MB) detected properly. I know very little about hardware as you can problably tell. I have writen down my drive perameters (cylenders, sectors, heads) for all my drives. If I unplug my 1MB sec master then it will boot my computer, if I leave it conected then I get an error saying pri slave failed. or sometimes it just detects my CD-ROM and pri HDD but then stals and does nothing.

Does anyone know how I can fix it or what I may be doing wrong.

How old is your computer? Will the BIOS automatically detect the correct drive parameters? If so, let it do that rather then entering them manually... you may have entered them wrong. Also, I suggest you place the two hard drives on the master IDE cable and the cd-rom on the other IDE cable. Set the 2 GB drive as a master, and the 1 GB as a slave. Also, set the CD-ROM drive as a master for the second IDE cable. Check to see if that resolves the problem. If the CD-ROM doesn't show up all of a sudden, it's most likely a bad IDE cable and it will need replacing.

AJ

My computer is prity old, it is a fourm factor AT, 133MHz P2 processor with Award BIOS 04/25/97-VxPro-UMC8670-2A5LAH09C-00

I did try the auto detect but it only detects my 2GB on pri master and wont bother finding my CD-ROM or !MB drive, I am going to try what you just sugested and see if that works.

youd get on better if you 2gig master>2gig Slave then on the otherIDE channel Cdrom(master or Cable select) and the floppy on its own, some bios`s allow you to auto detect IDE devices try that, hook up some AMI/pheonix bios papers to help you along

thats if you have 2 main IDE channels, and make sure ur not using an old ATA66 cable


Preep

I just tryed avdven's sugestion to put both HDD on the same cable and on my secondary cable my CD-ROM as a master, that worked grat but then It kept crashing with memory errors. But it was not the cause of the memory failure because I have been haveing memory problems for about a couple of months. I realy need to get a new motherboard processor and hard drive. A mistake I made earlyer, I said it was a 2MB and 1MB (wow that is small) actualy they are 2GB and 1GB still small but much larger then what I said. Anyway thanks for the help, it did work, At boot up it auto detected all my drives, unfortunaly due to memory failure i had to disconect the second HD, and that fixed the memory problem, sorta.

Thanks both of you for the help. I have learned alot about hard drives and bios settings.

If you're having memory errors with everything attached, but not when you remove one of the drives, it's quite possible that you are over-tasking your power supply. If the machine is old, it's possible that the power supply can only handle a certain amount of components attached before it starts unevenly distributing the power. You may want to experiment with having different components attached and detached. One thing you can try as well is to unplug cables and components and reinsert them. It's possible that something is simply not properly inserted (such as an IDE cable on the motherboard, or a RAM chip which isn't insert properly, etc.). Also, if you can, find someone who has a computer with the same memory chips and try those for a bit to see if you receive memory errors. It could be anything from insufficient power to bad memory chips to problems with your IDE port. Just play around with it and see if you can recreate the errors. If so, let us know what you find the problem to be, and maybe we can help you further troubleshoot it.

AJ

In Standard CMOS Setup of BIOS, select "AUTO" for Pri. Master, Pri Slave, Sec. Master and Sec. Slave. Do not go behind Cyl. Sec and tracks. You can see the hard drive info after POST (Power on Self Test).

I'd have to agree with avdven, the power supply may be a big part of this. If your power supply is hovering around the 100 watt s/output level, you need to consider another power supply. I tried connecting a CD-RW to my (t)rusty little Compaq, and it wouldn't boot up with both devices attached. Any power-drain is going to suck resources away from something else, and a hard-drive ( or CD_ROM for that matter) can be the worst of the culprits. If your memory isn't getting enough juice, you'll get errors, or simply no-boot/POST error codes.

zaddikim

he sorry if this was sayed before but is your jumper setting an the hd set to slave?

With avdven's method all my drives are auto detected, I think you are right about the power supply now that I think about it, Every time I conect the second hard drive I run into memory errors all the time, but if I dissconect it then it boots ok. I was confused because I thought maybe I was running out of swap space./

The memory error I get is shown on the bios startup, it says memory faillled. Press F1 to continue. If I push F1 sometimes I can boot ok but normaly after a few dozen trys. You ppl have taught me alot about hardware already, I did not know that there was a limit to how much hardware the power supply can handle. I will have to live with what I have untill
I get some cash in which case I will be buying a new motherboard, processor, and case.

Do cases come with power supplys?

Yes, most cases do come with power supplies, but some do not. When I build a computer, either for myself or for someone else, I look at the demands of the computer and decide whether to buy a case with a power supply or without. The problem with many cases with power supplies is that they're usually 300 or 350 Watts, and sometimes, I need more. For my first server, for example, I bought a case which would hold two power supplies and purchased two 450 W power supplies so that I knew I wouldn't have any problems with adding as many SCSI hard drives as I needed. One other computer I have which I built has only a 300 W power supply and I can't add any more hard drives (it already has two hard drives, a CD-RW, DVD-ROM, internal Zip, floppy, 5 PCI cards, 1 AGP card and 1 ISA card) without blue screening constantly. If you figure out what you want, do a rough estimate of the power consumption that it'll take, and add at least 50-100 Watts to that to be safe.

AJ

Hi ele5125,

Did you tried what i explained in my previous post.???