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Second Hard Disk

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by shashi kumar

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I have installed a second hard disk on the Primary Slave slot. Due to certain problems in the first hard disk, I tried making the first Hard disk as Primary slave and the second one as Primary master. However the BIOS still recognises the first harddisk as primary master

19 replies

by opatzg9

The way around this is to start with just the second drive connected as master. fdisk and format the drive to be a bootable primary drive.
Load your operating system on it. Get it up and functional alone. Then take and reattach the old boot driveas a slave drive and you should be fine. It may not hurt to make the old drive the master on the secondary controller to speed up transfer of files between the two drives but sometimes your cables/case will not allow that.
Good luck!

by shashi kumar

Yes but it doesnt help if I am already using the second Hard disk. I will loose a lot of data in that case. thanks anyway

by maxwell edison

The drives have jumpers that define them as either master or slave. Have you changed the jumper on the drive that "was" slave, but you want to make master?

by fenaikh

Hi
Set the jumpers correctly master and salve and make sure that some hard disk requier setting 2 jumbers not only one. The other thing that some drives alaways like to be master if the other is not the same brand or type. Try to use the 2nd IDE if you have one to check this facts.

Good luck

Mohamed

by paulp

Try switching around the ribbon cable. If I remember correctly, the master needs to be the last connector on the ribbon cable, and the slave needs to be on the middle connector even if they are jumpered correctly.

by sgt_shultz

what is the drives model number?
where is the jumper set now?
its position on the (IDE) cable should only matter if using a cable select (CS) type cable...

by opatzg9

I don't believe you can boot from a slave drive.
Am I right in that? If so my first suggestion still stands and if you added the drive because your other one was acting up well then your operasting system is still running from a bad drive. I'ld back up your drives and reformat using the new drive as the holder of your operating system. Otherwise get another drive and use that for the operating system, copy the files from the drive with problems that you still want and then remove it and addyour current new drive as the secondary.

by maxwell edison

You can indeed boot from a drive defined as a slave - if the BIOS supports booting from various devices. Go into the BIOS and change to boot order to whatever was assigned to that slave device, D-Drive for instance.

Perhaps that is what was askedin the first place.

by csmith

Don't format.
Don't fdisk.
The new drive can be made the boot drive if it is SYSed.
This loads the basic OS files.
I would not even do this.

Since Hard Drives are so cheap, I would buy another drive, Ghost the bad C: drive image on to it and install it as C: .
This would insure that both hard drives were new, and there would be minimal changing of files, OS settings, etc. , and you would have plenty of space for more data.
Regards, Chris

by ^trix

I would start by making sure the jumpers are set properly. f they are you can always go into your BIOS and see if you can change it there but be careful if you do that not to mess anything up and have a backup of your BIOS in case you do.

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