HDD issues with 2 drives on Primary IDE

[Keith Roberts]

I recently installed a second HDD on the Primary IDE as
my old one was giving signs of failing. I have been
through the entire process of re-allocating the drive
letters (via Regedit in the end as XP seemed reluctant to
allow me to change it via disk management). With just the
new drive connected to the primary IDE channel, the
system boots up fine.

However, the problem, comes when both drives are
connected to the Primary IDE channel, I am prompted
to 'press F1 to resume' during boot-up.
I have set and doubled checked the jumpers on both
drives, so that the new one is master (contains XP) and
the old one is slave (to be used for media storage).

Any thoughts on this one?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Keith Roberts]

I have checked the status of both drives concerning
partiotions, using system manager, and the secondary
drive's partition is not active. Any other ideas?

 

[LVTravel]

Keith, If you had to change the drive letter in Regedit something is
obviously wrong.

I will assume that this a new, out-of-the-box, hard drive you are attempting
to install as the slave on your Primary IDE channel.

1. Make sure you change, if necessary, the jumper on the new Master drive
(the current drive you boot from) as some manufacturers require a different
jumper setting for a Master with Slave present than a Master/single drive.
I have seen boot problems with this not set correctly even though bios sees
both drives.

2. Click Start, Settings, Control Panel. Double click on Administrative
Tools, double click on Computer Management. Single click on Disk
Management. Once the list in the right column populates, scroll down to the
new drive. Does it appear as Healthy? If so the drive should also show a
current drive letter and format type (NTFS or FAT).
If not, the drive needs to be partitioned and formatted. Right click on
the drive and select partition or initialize. If partition is selected you
need to format the drive after the partition.

3. If the jumpers are set correctly and the drive is not in the list at
all, click Action menu item and then click Rescan Disks. If this doesn't
show the drive, you need to reboot the computer and come back to this place
again. If this still doesn't show the drive you either have a bad drive,
cable or jumper setting.


--
Please respond back to the newsgroup when your problem has been solved to
assist all on the newsgroup


I have checked the status of both drives concerning
partiotions, using system manager, and the secondary
drive's partition is not active. Any other ideas?