I recently purchased a used 80gb hard drive. I replaced the existing 20gb drive. I find that I am having similar problems with the replacement drive. The problem is that sometimes it is detected and sometimes not. I have it connected as a slave to my DVD burner which is set to master. I brought the hard drive back to the store yesterday. They said the drive was perfect and booted normally. They replaced the ribbon cable and said that it might work now. It did work all day but this morning when I rebooted the it was not detected again. Sometimes the computer hangs on "detecting drives." Other times it diplays a line of garbage after the BIOS screen instead of the ususal listing of the 80 gb hd and the dvd. I also have two sata2 drives installed. I'm beginning to suspect the controller on my Asus P5B-VM mobo, but everything works normally with the hd disconnected. I am also wondering if the multiple OS setup is confusing the computer somehow. I am using the drives for testing multiple operating systems and have been using BIOS to select drive order. Now, of course, the 80gb drive is not showing in BIOS. I try the hd without the DVD as master but it is still not detected. Thanks in advance for any assistance in narrowing down this problem.
try the new 80Gb drive set as master, slave & C/S (cable select), trying multiple OS is not the problem cable select is basically setting the device as master or slave by the devices location on the IDE cable, both devices should be set to C/S BTW: you may find that setting the cevices to C/S solves the problem basically the device connected furthest from the motherboard will be master & the device in the middle IDE connector will be the slave, failing that, try the HDD on another known working system to eliminate your system from being the problem
also if none of the above suggestings work, try disconnecting the dvd drive for a few days and see if that makes any difference
Thanks for the replies. At the moment I have the drive disconnected and am just using the DVD which causes no problems. I think I have tried most or all of these combinations without success. I am planning to try the drive on another computer later today. I have XP64 installed on this hard drive. If the trouble is with the controller on this computer and not with the hard drive, what should I expect to happen when I hook it up as master to another computer with a 32-bit processor?
I tried one more time hooking up the devices in all the possible combinations. The conclusion is tha the DVD works well in any scenario. The hard drive is not detected in any scenario. If hooked up as master alone the computer hangs on "detecting drives" and will not boot. One oddity that I never say before was the "drive not ready" error at the conclusion of booting (see attached). I had to click "cancel." This did not happen when I disconnected my iPod. I will try the drive in my wife's computer next. IMHO the drive is a dud.
I tried it on my wife's computer (in place of the only drive that was on it) using no jumper for master mode. It was detected by BIOS but gave a hard disk failure. Is this what you would expect on a 32-bit machine with the XP 64-bit OS installed on the drive? My wife's computer has a abit KG7 mobo with an Athlon AMD 1.4 CPU (no doubt this is limted to 32-bit only software). I do not have another 64-bit computer to test it on. I'm beginning to lean toward the controller in my own mobo (an Asus P5B-VM) I purchased the system last October. Thanks in advance for your updated assessment.
