Slave drive set up

Try using Tweak UI from the Microsoft web site as it may be the drive is hidden.

New drive?
make sure both drives are plugged to correct connectors master at the end and the slave in the middle with compatible cable. Power connectors connected. Run F-disk for partition from DOS and format it.
And check the system in control panel if the DMA is enabled.

Old used? I had one drive that was just out of warranty period. Bios read fine, but not the Windows. Drive spun, but death.

Have you partitioned and formated the second drive?

Okay, for starters windows will only recognize partitions <=32 gig. This means when you fdisk the drive you make the primary partition 32 gig or less and then after setting that, make the extended partitions to take up the rest of the drive in 32 gig or less increments. Once fdisk has created the partitions reboot your machine.
Then you should be able to format each of the partitions with the format command. If you can't do this we need some more information.
How big is your drive you're installing?
Is BIOS seeing all of the drive or seeing it correctly as described by the manufacturer?
If you know your motherboard manufacturer who it is and what version of BIOS you're running.
Hope this helps, if not put more info out here and someone will know what is wrong. PS. I've installed a number of drives in my home pc's and never has it gone easy the first time so don't be to frustrated. Also, it wouldn't hurt to recheck the jumper settings to make sure it's what you want. A lot of the larger drives now a days will come with software to help the system better recognize them. If your pc is more than 2 years old it probably can not handle the larger drives available today without using the drive control software.
Good luck!

FDisk doesn't see the second drive to format it.
The drive does spin, so it's getting power.
Original drive is 6GB, second is also 6GB.
BIOS sees drive as described by manufacturer.
Without looking (and not at home) I can't say what the motherboard manufacturer is nor what version of AMIBIOS (American Megatrends) it's running.
I did check the jumpers and the cables, and everything looks ok.... Any suggestions with the drive being smaller than you might have thought I was trying to install?

Point value changed by question poster.

Becuase they are 6GB drives, I'll venture a guess that they are not too new. That the BIOS recognizes the drives is good. The drives are small enough that there shouldn't be any problems with partition size. If the drives are from different manufacturers, they may have trouble playing nice together, even if all the jumpers are correct.

I have two ideas:

Reset the drives to both be master. Connect the second hard drive to the second IDE channel, temporarily disconnecting the CD-ROM if required. See if windows finds the disk then. You may get away with putting the 2nd drive & the CD-ROM in a master/slave configuration.

You might also try having both drives on the same IDE channel, but set them both to "cable select", rather than master or slave. This works best on newer motherboards, using 80 pin cables.

HTH

Make it simple..
Set up the drive you are trying to get to function as master, disconnect all the rest of the drives and boot from diskette and see if you can fdisk the drive. Maybe you drive don't work.
If fdisk fly's the go ahead and format the drive the make all the necessary jumper changes and see if windows sees the drive..

1. After trying different suggestions, neither drive would work. After I swapped out the ribbon cable, I got the original drive to work. I then replaced the original drive with the one I was trying to slave in. The drive either a)no loger works right or b) is not supported by this motherboard/BIOS.
2. After putting the original hard drive back in and (because I'm down a ribbon cable) slaving in the CDRom, BIOS and Windows recognizes CDRom but it won't work (Error: Drive not ready). Jumpers are correct.

Sounds like the board doesn't support the use of slaves. (What a politically correct board ;])

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