Installing another Hard drive. Please help

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Guest

I have a 40 gigabyte hard drive that came with my Advent PC.
I have managed to salvage another 40gb hard drive from my friends computer.
So I am trying to install it into my PC.
Everytime I connect The Hard drives to each other my computer wont load.
It says cannot load operating system, but when I plug the master cable into either hardrive the operating system loads.
How do I connect them both, so that the original is the master and the other acts as the slave. When I open the BIOS it wont even detect the second hardrive.
Please help cause this has been messing me around all week.
Thanks for any help you can give.
 
Have you set the jumper on the newest drive to "Slave" ?


Ghoster10 said:
I have a 40 gigabyte hard drive that came with my Advent PC.
I have managed to salvage another 40gb hard drive from my friends computer.
So I am trying to install it into my PC.
Everytime I connect The Hard drives to each other my computer wont load.
It says cannot load operating system, but when I plug the master cable
Click to expand...
into either hardrive the operating system loads.
How do I connect them both, so that the original is the master and the
Click to expand...
other acts as the slave. When I open the BIOS it wont even detect the second
hardrive.
 
If you can't see the drive in the bios then XP won't stand a chance. Just
make sure that your boot drive is jumpered as the master and that the
salvaged drive is jumpered as the slave, I suspect that the 2nd drive is
also jumpered as a master and that's why it's not working.

Ghoster10 said:
I have a 40 gigabyte hard drive that came with my Advent PC.
I have managed to salvage another 40gb hard drive from my friends computer.
So I am trying to install it into my PC.
Everytime I connect The Hard drives to each other my computer wont load.
It says cannot load operating system, but when I plug the master cable
Click to expand...
into either hardrive the operating system loads.
How do I connect them both, so that the original is the master and the
Click to expand...
other acts as the slave. When I open the BIOS it wont even detect the second
hardrive.
 
Well Ive made sure that the salavaged is jumpered as the slave. But its still doing the same thing. Could the fact that theyve both got operating systems on be a problem. Cause my original has got Xp but the salvaged has windows ME. I only have 2 Ports on my Motherboard for Hardware. The 1st is used for my DVD dirve & CD Re-Writer and the second is being used for my Hard drives.
This is really annoying me now!!!
 
Did you set the jumper on each hard drive? One should be set to master and
the other to slave if they are both on the same IDE cable.

Ghoster10 said:
I have a 40 gigabyte hard drive that came with my Advent PC.
I have managed to salvage another 40gb hard drive from my friends computer.
So I am trying to install it into my PC.
Everytime I connect The Hard drives to each other my computer wont load.
It says cannot load operating system, but when I plug the master cable
Click to expand...
into either hardrive the operating system loads.
How do I connect them both, so that the original is the master and the
Click to expand...
other acts as the slave. When I open the BIOS it wont even detect the second
hardrive.
 
Yea I have and it dont work if they're connected like that. I can't figure out whats wrong!
 
It doesn't matter what's on the slave drive as far as an OS goes and besides
the bios wouldn't care what if anything is on the drive. Are the drive
Western Digitals? If so then there are jumpers for single drive (master) or
dual drives (master or slave). Quite different from, say a Maxtor.

Ghoster10 said:
Well Ive made sure that the salavaged is jumpered as the slave. But its
Click to expand...
still doing the same thing. Could the fact that theyve both got operating
systems on be a problem. Cause my original has got Xp but the salvaged has
windows ME. I only have 2 Ports on my Motherboard for Hardware. The 1st is
used for my DVD dirve & CD Re-Writer and the second is being used for my
Hard drives.
 
Try setting the jumpers on both hard drives to Cable Select. Make sure your
original hard drive is connected to the last connector on the cable and the
other to the middle connector.
 
The first drive should be jumpered as "master" or "master with slave"
assuming it was the old master and jumpered as "master". On some drives
these are the same, on some there is a different setting. The second
should be set to "slave". If the old drive was set to "cable select"
then both should be set th "cable select". If CS is used, look at the
cable. It should have the connectors marked. Most I have seen have a
blue fitting for the end to the motherboard, the boot drive (master) is
on the other end, and the slave goes in the middle. In any case go into
the bios setup and make sure that the slave is set to auto, it may be
set to not installed. I doubt that a 40 gig drive is old enough that it
used LBA or Large with specific parameters.

As far as the two active partitions are concerned (one on each drive),
you can go into fdisk and reset the primary partition on the slave to
inactive but normally it should be ignored by windows. As an aside,
Fat32 which is the format probably installed on the 40 gig from ME or 98
only supports a 32 gig partition. Therefore either it is partitioned or
an overlay is likely installed. If you are using NTFS on the prmiary
drive you may want to convert or reformat the new slave as NTFS all in
one partition.
 
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