Topic: Hard Drive Detection

[GillE]

Whenever I switch on my backup computer, it fails to detect a hard drive that was installed some time ago.  For months, I?ve been getting around this by entering the bios on boot-up and searching for the drive.  The bios detects the drive and the system boots up as it should.  When I switch the macine off, it seems to forget the additional drive and I have to enter the bios agin the next time I switch it on.

Lately, I?ve been using this machine more frequently and it really annoys me that I have to enter the bios each time.  Can anyone suggest a way to make the bios detect the hard drive automatically?

It?s an Award bios v6.00Pg with the ID string: 09/28/2001-i845-W627HF-6A69UM4GC-00 , the chipset is:  i845-W627HF//Intel x9W , the Computer ID is: FC, SubTyp: 02, BIOS-Level 116.  I hope this makes sense to somebody, because it?s gibberish to me!

Yours

Gill

[Sandra]

Have you got the boot drive set as the master, or single master if its the only drive on the primary IDE channel Gill  
Some hard drives have 2 jumpers in then for certain configurations whereas most only use one.
If the jumpers are set correctly and the bios to auto detect the drives it should find it each time  

[GillE]

That was a prompt reply, Sandra!  Thanks very much .

Apparently, it's a secondary slave drive. I shall follow your advice and take a peek inside the machine to inspect the jumper settings.  Unfortunately, there's not much room inside the case which is why I didn't fit the drive myself.  I had it done by an 'expert' at PC world > and after many complaints I decided to cut my losses while the machine was at least working after a fashion.

Yours

Gill

[Sandra]

I may have misunderstood you Gill, sorry.
I thought it didnt boot until you went into the bios and manually selected the drive.
Are you saying that it will boot normally but doesnt see the that drive ?
Also when you say its a secondary slave drive does that mean that its a slave to say a cd drive as master on the secondary IDE channel ?
I realise that some people get confused over this but just to clarify things, a pc has 2 IDE channels, a primary and a secondary.
Each IDE channel has a master and a slave.
I usually set my hardrives up on the primary IDE channel with the boot drive as the master and the second drive as a slave.
I then use the secondary IDE channel for my DVD and CD roms/writers set as master and slave.

[Sandra]

Did you get any farther with the drive problem Gill ?
I had a similar problem with a drive last week in one of those shuttle pcs.
It would hang at detecting the drive as it booted up but it always detected it ok if I went into the bios and tried the detect drives option.
It would boot up on average one time in four but just hang at the detecting drives stage.
Tried it as a secondary master in another pc and it wouldnt get past the detecting drives stage again more times than it would do.
When it finally did detect and boot it was possible to save what was required off it to another pc via the LAN.
I think the drive must have some bad sectors which may be ok again after a low level format or its more likely that the drive is on its way out  

[GillE]

Did you get any farther with the drive problem Gill ?

Gosh, Sandra! I appreciate your concern and there's no way you could have known, but...you're joking!

It would appear that the hard drive on my main system (less than 6 months old) has just turned up its toes.  Blue screen dump followed by failure to detect the hard drive on restart.  The plan is now to return it to the supplier tomorrow and see where we go from there.  In the meantime, I ain't about to start tampering with my back up system  !

I'll start delving inside when I'm not quite so reliant on just the one machine.

Yours gloomily

Eyeore

[Sandra]

I had a boot drive on my server fail after only 6 or 7 months  
Fortunately it had a 3 year guarantee and was speedily replaced, with an 80 gig drive instead of the original 60 gig which failed as for some reason the 80 was now cheaper than the 60  
I didnt lose much apart from the time taken to reinstall the OS and related programs and the server settings but it did teach me not to be complacent about drive failures even though it may be relatively new  

[GillE]

Hi Sandra

The good news is that the HDD on my main system hadn't crashed after all - just a loose power cable  :-[.

So I've had a look inside my backup. There are 5 drives altogether: one floppy, two HDDs, one DVD player and one DVD RW.  When I switch the computer on, the machine will boot up quite happily from the primary HDD but it won't detect the secondary HDD unless I go into the bios and tell the machine to auto-detect the secondary IDE slave.  I've noticed that the jumper for the secondary HDD is set at the far right, a position I'd normally associate with a a primary drive.

The cabling looks quite peciliar.  The HDDs each appear to be slaved off a DVD drive!  That's probably because the cables aren't very long and the technician who installed the upgrades might have had to make do with what he'd got.

Any thoughts?

Yours

Gill

[Tony]

Hi Gill,

In the absense of Our Sandra......she might be having a line in  

Both Hard Drives should be on the same cable, and they in turn should be connected into the motherboard socket IDE1 [ the blue one]and the CD-Rom drives connected on the other cable into socket IDE2.

The Primary Hard Drive is connected to the cable using the connector on the cable farthest away from the connector you plug into the Mobo.The Slave Hard Drive is connected to the middle connector on the same cable. The same connection criteria is used for the CD-Rom drives but on Mobo socket IDE2. Slave Drives always connect to the middle socket on IDE cables, just make sure the jumpers on the HHD /CD-Roms are set correctly. There is usually a ?jumper? diagram on the drives some where, and don?t assume anything, there is no standard jumper layout used by all manufactures.

[Sandra]

Some people do set the drives up with the boot drive as the master on the primary IDE channel and a dvd/cd as slave and the second hard drive as the master on the secondary IDE channel.
As far as I know the slowest IDE device on each channel governs the speed of that channel, as the dvd and cd roms and writers are slower than the hard drives I prefer them on the primary IDE channel as a master and a slave.
But either way should work ok as long as the jumpers are set correctly for master, slave or as cable select on each IDE device  

[Tony]

I actually set my jumpers as "cable select" on both HHD's as I have a copy of the OS on both my Hard Drives. I only have one connected at any given time, as the non connected one is only there as a backup in case the Drive I'm using fails. That way I just swop the cable from one to the other whilst it is in situ, and the PC is up and running again in two ticks.