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Slave drive installation causing BIOS to not recognize primary drive

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9 replies

by ebayva

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Working on a P3 system for a customer where his 20GB hard drive had "bad sectors" so he wanted me to install XP Pro on a new hard drive and set his old one as a slave so he could still access information. Unfortunately, after futher inspection of the system, the motherboard was shot, bad caps. So I built him a Dell GX270, installed XP Pro and all was fine until I installed the slave drive. Jumpers are set to Master w/slave present on the primary drive and slave on the old hard drive. The system boots and gives me an error saying that the Primary drive is not there. Everything works great if I take the slave back out. How do I make this work or get his info off the old drive if it is a case of a bad drive?

9 replies

by the scummy one

as a USB drive. There is likely a hardware conflict between these 2 drives.

by ebayva

I'm currently being MacGyver and rigging an external CDRW to be an external HDD. It connects by firewire...best I could come up with. I'm gonna check it out and I'll let you know if it fixes the problem. Thanks for the suggestion!

by kenone

Take the jumper off of the primary drive and boot it.

by ebayva

Actually, taking the jumper off of the primary drive did not fix the problem. However, it did prompt me to double check the jumper on the slave drive. I had apparently read the picture backwards or failed to engage my brain when installing the slave jumper. It was in the wrong spot anyway. As soon as I fixed the jumper, everything boots just fine. Thanks!

by peconet tietokoneet

If the motherboard is new on this DELL, have you tried to update the BIOS?. It could be a slight error in the BIOS setup.
If it works ok with the SLAVE drive out then just load on the XP software and all of the updates and then connect the OLD drive to the motherboard to see it resolves the problem.
Post back if you have any more questions or problems.

by ebayva

I updated the BIOS from A04 to A07...same results. Trying other suggestions, but will post again if I'm still having issues. Thanks

by seanferd

and store it on the new master or a new slave.

The old drive is likely to continue to degrade, and when it dies, there goes all that data the fellow wanted to save.

As a 20Gb drive, it is probably fairly old. Also, if the data rate of the old drive is lower than the new one, it will degrade the performance of the new drive when on a shared cable.

by ebayva

When he picks up the machine, I will definitely let him know. That poor old drive is really on its way out, making all kinds of protest noises and everything. However, he wants it as a slave drive, so I did as I was asked. Thanks for your help

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