Windows boots with system harddrive, add another HDD on same ribbon, will not boot.

I

Inferno32

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Mar 28, 2007
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I bought a new case and took the parts from one case and put them into the new one. It will boot if only my 40 gig HDD is plugged in, the on that has windows installed on it. My other, my data drive which is a seagate 300 gig, if put as slave on the same cable keeps the computer from booting. I have the same setup as before, it makes no sense that it wouldn't work now. PLEASE help i've been working on it so much and im at a deadend. Thanks in advance
 
Sounds like a jumper issue. Make sure both drives are set properly. If that doesn't work, check your motherboard jumpers, although that's less common and the first is usually it. If that doesn't work, try a different cable.
 
Have tried different cables, the jumpers on each are set to cable select and they show up as master/slave like they are on the cable. Would incorrect jumpers cause it to not boot?
 
Could, sometimes they're finicky. Depends on the exact parts you're using, sometimes cable select works just fine (otherwise what would be the point?).Haven't touched IDE in ages, but IIRC the Master drive should be the terminating one.

Did you make sure there isn't something odd with the motherboard jumpers too (this is uncommon, but it happens sometimes)?

Just a random suspicion - have you checked the boot order in the BIOS to make sure it's looking at the right drive?
 
Yup, checked BIOS, boot order has the 40 gig booting first. Is the terminating drive the one with the OS on it? I have the 40 gig one with the OS set to master. The computer worked just fine on thursday before i disassembled and reassembled. Nothing has changed, i left the jumpers how they were as master/slave. The motherboard jumpers should be fine. Then i tried cable select, no avail. Tried every combination of different cables/jumpers/slots/power cables, nothing has yielded different results!
 
Inferno32 said:
I've also set the jumpers to master/slave as well and the same event occurs.
Click to expand...

Some drives have a "Slave w/ master present" or a "Master w/ slave present" setting on the jumpers.


Also, some drives prefer that if you left the jumpers off for the master and others diagrams are backwards or may appear that way.
 
Inferno32 said:
Yup, checked BIOS, boot order has the 40 gig booting first. Is the terminating drive the one with the OS on it? I have the 40 gig one with the OS set to master. The computer worked just fine on thursday before i disassembled and reassembled. Nothing has changed, i left the jumpers how they were as master/slave. The motherboard jumpers should be fine. Then i tried cable select, no avail. Tried every combination of different cables/jumpers/slots/power cables, nothing has yielded different results!
Click to expand...

Hmm, scratch my first suggestion.


Check to see if your 300gb slave drive works, I have a feeling that it may have been damaged during your transition to the new case. Check your connections and make sure it's making proper contact.
 
The thing is, with the 300gig i did push the pins in. I pulled them out and they are a bit shorter, but the drive is still detected by the system and i did a diagnostic on it with ultimate boot cd and it passed both the long and short test so i assume the drive is still fie then right? I also threw in another HDD i had lying around and the same error came up. Even if a drive is faulty, that shouldn't completely prevent the other HDD from being able to boot would it?
 
It could, but it's not exactly a common type of failure.

The terminating drive is just me using quasi-SCSI terminology somewhere that it's not entirely accurate. I mean the one on the end of the cable. I may have it backwards, though, maybe the one closest to the controller should be master...:confused:

*googles*

Yeah, I have it backwards. The drive nearest the controller should be master. Since you want to boot off the OS drive, it would be best to make that one master (you would never want only the non-boot drive attached). Also, this only matters with a 40-wire IDE cable, not an 80-wire one...know which you've got? If it came with the motherboard, they frequently ship an 80 for the hard drive and a 40 for the optical drive. Umm...a 40-wire should have wires about as large/dense as a flat floppy cable. 80-pin wires will have thinner bumps on the ribbon and more of them.

--> Tried multiple cables.
--> Tried multiple hard drives.

Could still be the jumpers, like Ockie said - make sure it's not on "independent master" or "standalone master," some label like that. Also make sure the jumper looks to be making an electrical connection, I've seen cases where putting it in upside down or if it was damaged, it was as good as nothing there.

If you have an IDE optical drive, what happens if you slave that to your boot drive?
 
I have the OS HDD set to master w/slave present. I've tried the master/slave combo on each spot on the ribbon, it appears to be an 80 ribbon, very small bumps while the optical cable has considerably larger bumps. It gets to the last bios screen where it says boot from cd then it hangs there and says some Disk Failure, Please insert system disk and press enter.

This is such bs.
 
I had that problem when I added a seoncd IDE 250 WD drive over the summer on an Asus A8R32-MVP. Both hd's worked great on their own, but together on this board they didn't work.

Afraid I can't help you, I ended up just switching the IDE 250 with a SATA 250 I had in another computer. :eek:

I never could get it to work and I tried everything you tried. To this day I have no idea what the problem was.

I know this post doesn't really help, but at least you aren't the only one to have PC gremlins.
 
Well guys i think this is due to a bum drive. I found an old computer and i took that HDD out. Boots just fine with it in and i can even access it. I noticed that 2 of the pins are pushed in a bit and that may be the problem, i'll try to pull them out.
 
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