Community archive

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Two Hard Drives One Partition

0 helpful
8 replies

by sellersx2

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.
I recently installed a new CD-RW in a system with one Hard Drive and one CD-ROM. Instead of replacing the CD-ROM I put both CD's on the secondary controller and left the hard drive on the primary. I thought the new cd-rw would automatically defaultto E: and the hardrive and cd-rom would remain c: and d: respectively. To my surprise windows now sees two hard drives c: and d:, one cd-rom e: and one cd-rw f: ? When I run fdisk and display drive information I only get one active partiton. Also when I run my virus scan it will only read d: as the bootable partition. Both c: and d: show the same drive configuration and even show the same contents in My Computer. Any ideas ?

8 replies

by hal 9000

Actually without any more info I'm at a loss as well as this should not happen even if the jumpers aren't set properly on the second IDE channel as it should only affect the second channel. However as most IDE CRDW's tell you not to have a reader and burner on the same channel it might cure your problem if you move one of the drives to the primary IDE channel and leave the other optical drive on the second channel at tleast that way you'll be able to perform disk to disk copies without read errors. Even if it doesn't fix the current problem.

by hal 9000

I don't know if this will help but with a lot of new HDD that I've used recently they come with a factory default setting of "Cable Select" I'm wondering if this could be the problem.

I always change them but I've seen a lot of repairs where they have been fitted by othere as supplied at least it is some form of explination.

by sellersx2

It's a Win98 system. i did think of that. I will attempt to slave the CD-ROM to the HDD. Thanks

by thechas

First of all, questions belong in the Technical Q&A section of the site, and not the discussion forum.

Start by checking the jumpers on ALL drives.

As presently configured:

Your hard drive should be jumpered as single drive, or master without slave present.

Your CD-Rom drive should be jumpered as Master.

Your CD-RW drive should be jumpered as Slave.

If you follow Collins suggestion, the jumpers are as follows:

Hard drive: Master with slave present.

CD-Rom drive Slave

CD-RW drive either position should function.

Now, make sure that the bios settings for all drives is correct, and DMA mode is set as recommended by the drive and motherboard mfg.

I suspect that you will still have problems in Windows.
Windows has likely switched your drives to MS-DOS compatibility mode.
There should be a Microsoft Knowledge base article for how to disable compatibility mode for your version of Windows.

Alternately: from device manager, remove ALL drives and drive controllers.
When you re-boot, Windows should find and re-install the hardware properly.

You may need to download the drivers for the chip-set on your motherboard to get everything working properly.

Chas

by sellersx2

No more questions in the Discussion Center, got it.

I will attempt to switch the CD-ROM back to the primary channel. Thanks

by jardinier

Having earlier asked my personal guru how to organise a similar setup, I was advised that BIOS will always recognise a HDD before a CD Drive in terms of assigning them a drive letter. The obvious thing would be to install the CD-ROM as a slave on the Primary IDE, and the CD-R/W as Master on the Secondary IDE.

This discussion is closed to new replies.