Recognizing Slave drive

I may be misunderstanding your question but I think you may have your drives in the wrong spots on the ribbon cable. The very end of the ribbon cable is where the Primary Drive (master drive) should go. The middle connector is where the slave drive should go. Then, in the BIOS, make sure that the Primary Slave option is enabled. Hope this helps! Thanks

Also be sure your BIOS is set up to look for the drives, the safest bet is to have them set to auto for now, that way you can swap drives, cd-roms, internal zips, and all that without touching the BIOS again.

It really don't matter where on the ribbon you have the drives as long as you have the jumper on the right setting. Master for the primary and slave for thr second hard drive. Check the CMOS to see if you have auto detect on. Also you can put the second harddrive as a secondary master on a second ribbon.

Check your ribbon cable. If there is a section between the two hard drive connectors that is split and twisted, you must set both drives for "Cable Select". If not, set your boot drive for "Master" and the other for "Slave". If the cable isn't twisted it doesn't matter where they are plugged in. You might check the manufacturer's web site to make sure you have the right jumper configuration.

Try to use TWO cabels and set HDDs to primary mode.
If you don't know I can tell you that some old drives don't want to work with others, cause are not compartible (Firm vs Firm).

If it is IDE then it doesn't matter where the drives are placed on the ribbon cable. The problem is most likely that the master is not configured for a master. It is probably configured as a stand alone. Some brand names require the master to be jumpered to a master so that it knows a slave is present while other companies hard drives do not need to be set and can stay at stand-aone.

Also...some manufacturers hard drives just do not communicate together. In this case, set the slave to a stand-alone drive and put it on the secondary drive controller.