TYAN Freezes After Installing Additional HDD

Many a time, I have had problems installing a Maxtor drive as a slave with ANY other brand drive as the Master.

For whatever reason, it "usually" works if the Maxtor drive is the master.

For system compatibility, and stability, I ALWAYS install multiple drives from the same manufacture.

Yes, you can install a PCI controller card and still boot off of your primary master drive on the motherboard.

Another option would be to install the Maxtor as the slave drive on your secondary IDE controller.

Chas

I couldn't find your Tyan M'Board listed on their site so you may have a problem with the BIOS not able to recognize a 200 GIG HDD. If that is the case you'll need to run it off a IDE to PCI plug in Card as the M'Board BIOS doesn't affect these cards.

You could also try changing the IDE cable to one of the new ones where you can just leave the drives on Cable Select and allow the M'Board to pickup the drives as they appear on the IDE lead just remember that the Master is always at the end of the cable and the Slave on the middle connector.

I've found that the Maxtor's don't like working as a slave with the Seagate Drives but as I generally don't use WD Drives I can not comment on how they work with these but if after you push the plugs in it is working it sounds like you have the wrong IDE lead for the drive and it isn't making proper contact with the pins on the HDD so I would be looking at something like the Antec Cobra IDE Leads which do work very well.

Failing that you could always Ghost the WD Drive contents to the Maxtor and then run the Maxtor as the Boot Drive and the WD as the slave as see how that works.

Col