Installed a new WD hard drive. The drive is 40G @ 7200RPM and is set as the master with a slave on IDE 1. The old drive is a 6G @ 5400RPM and is set as the slave on IDE 1. IDE 2 only has a CD-ROM set as master without other drives. The new driveis attached to the first 40 pin connector and the old drive is attached to the last 40 pin connector. The red stripe on the cable corresponds to pin one at all interfaces. The power is connected properly. The system consist of a Gigabyte GA-686BX MB, running a PentiumII @ 350Mhz with 448M of Ram. The video, sound and modem cards are connected as follows: AGP,PCI,ISA. The BIOS is Award 686bx f1f; although it still shows version 4.51 at the top of BIOS setup, with 686bx f1f shown at boot further down the page. The new drive has Windows 98SE and the old drive has Windows 98SE and Windows 2000.
When I first installed the drive everything worked fine, including all of the restarts with the loading of a new OS. However, upon cold boot thenext day none of the hard drives were detected by the BIOS. I restarted several times with no effect until I powered down while in the CMOS setup and the drives were detected upon power up. This did not last and the next day I could not boot, as the drives were not detected.
I tried the old drive on its own on both IDE’s and it worked fine. I did the same thing with the new one and it only worked here and there. I tried several different setup arrangements with jumper settings and cable locations with no avail. I eventually put the PC back to the first configuration and set the CMOS settings of the drives manually. The drives booted once, but would not on a cold boot. I later discovered that if I started the PC while having the power disconnected to the new drive and then giving it power after the post “all good” beep, everything works fine and the drives are detected then my OS loads.