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Recognizing Slave Drives

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by fraiha

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I recently bought a WDC 120 IDE Harddrive and set it up from what i think properly. I connected the slave (new drive) to the disc drive seeing how Dells have little space in them. What i'm having problems is Windows does not recognize the slave drive, nor does it recognize the D Drive(Disc drive) anymore, when i disconnect the new drive it works properly again though. I've read here that this is because of the Starters, they are placed wrong. My master drive (8pins) i put the starter on the first row, left being first. My secondary drive (10pins) i placed it second to last, right being last. That seems right no?
I also read here that some times two drives do not communicate with each other. I have a Seagate 10gigs as master, and WDC as stated above. Anything i can do to allow Windows ME to recognize the new slave drive i just installed? Programs i can download anything? Thanks.

5 replies

by rcom

First the jumper (starters) settings are usually listed on the label of the drive. Some WD drives have seperate settings for being single or master and a drive that's set to single will not work with a slave attached. If the jumpers are not listed on the lable go to WD web site to find the correct settings. Since you didn't get any errors or hang on bootup I would think the drive either isn't setup in the BIOS, partitioned or formatted.

Once you turn on the system, the drive has to be recognized by the BIOS. If it's set to auto-detect and doesn't find the drive then there may be an issue with the jumper settings or the size being over the limit of what the BIOS can read. In the case of the size limitation you'll need to use the drive management software to spoof the BIOS into thinking it's an allowable size.

Next the drive needs to be fdisk'd and formatted. You'll need a Win ME boot disk. Since ME will not boot to a DOS prompt you'll need to create the disk using add remove programs, then select startup disk. Check your BIOS settings to make sure the computer is set to boot from a floppy. If you do use the management software all this will be done as the drive is setup. If and when you run fdisk make certain to first changeto the correct drive option 5 so you don't accidently erase your C drive..

The reason your D drive wasn't there is because there's 2 physical drives in the PC. It should of changed to E drive.

Basic drive hierarchy:
1. First (primary) partition on the first drive
2. First partition on the second drive
3. Any other partition(s) on first drive
4. Any other partition(s) on second drive
5. Any other IDE devices, i.e. CDROM

Good luck.

by thechas

RCOM is correct.

For some further information, check out the article on drive partitioning at www.aumha.org

Also, check out the fdisk tutorial links at www.fdisk.com/fdisk

I have 2 things to add.

1. Your CD drive may have DOS mode drivers installed in either autoexec.bat or config.sys
If these are set to assign "D:" to the CD drive, that is the most likely reason you are losing your CD drive with the WD drive installed.

2. It is recommended by Microsoft that you partition a secondary hard drive as an extended DOS partition.
Then create logical drives.
This way, all added drives on the new drive will be assigned letters after any existing real or logical drives on your primary drive.

Chas

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