okay, so here's the deal. I just recently bought dvd drive and i'm having trouble getting it installed and working with correctly with everything.
On my PC now i have two hard drives and a cd drive. My main hard drive with my operating system is my primary master with the cd drive as its slave. My othe hard drive is running off of an ATA card and is the secondary master.
I prefer to keep the HDs seperate for faster access. So i tried to hook up the dvd drive as the secondary master with the hard drive running as its slave. I got the PC to recognize both the HD and the dvd drive but the PC then refuses to load windows. it sits at the black screen that says Windows XP with that little blue load bar underneath, and the load bar just keeps cycling and nothing ever happens. When i shut it down and disconnected the HD and started up again, the pc recognize the dvd drive and started windows fine.
Any ideas from someone more savvy then me?
[ September 10, 2004, 12:24 PM: Message edited by: Strider ]
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Does BIOS recognize all four drives? And can you boot into Safe Mode?
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
BIOS recognizes all 4 drives.
i haven't tried to boot into safe mode.
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
And i cannot boot into safe mode.
Also, when BIOS does recognize the extra hard drive and the dvd drive it gives me a warning something along the lines of:
40 pin connector used. running at ultra33, if you want to run at ultra 66 use an 80 pin connector...
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
help?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Ah. Have you tried following their advice and using a more modern connector/cable?
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
do you think that would make a difference when I've been using that same cable with the hard drive for a year and it's been working fine?
is it because i've added another connection to the cable?
actually, strike that. i switched to using the cable that was sent with the dvd drive cause it was newer. but i think it was the same type as the previous cable i had on anyway.
[ September 10, 2004, 01:02 PM: Message edited by: Strider ]
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Do you still receive the pin warning with the newer cable?
This COULD matter, actually, although I wouldn't've thought it likely. How old is the hard drive on that same controller?
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
alright. update.
i replaced the cable i was using with the dvd drive and the extra hard drive(which is a pretty new hard drive), with a much better cable that i was using with my operating system hard drive and the cd drive.
it recognized all the drives fine and booted up fine. and i got no warning.
but i have one problem. hopefully minor. when i try to get into the extra hard drive it tells me it's not formatted and asks if i want to format it. Now, this is my 200 gig hard drive with ALL my files. have i already royally messed something up and lost all my files. and if not, how do i go about keeping those files and not having to format the drive?
*prays his files are intact*
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
oh, in answer to your question Tom, I WAS receiving the warning with the newer cable that came with the dvd drive.
but the one i got it to work with was a higher end one i bought some time ago.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
What file system were you using on the old hard drive? Was it FAT32 or NTFS?
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
by old hard drive you mean the one i was using as my secondary master? Cause that one is actually my new hard drive, but since it was infinitely larger than my old one, I left my old one in use for my operating system and use the new one solely for file storage.
in either case, it's NTFS.
i disconnected the dvd drive and put the hard drive back as the master and my files are all still there and it lets me access it fine. Now something i think *may* be causing this issue is that the hard drive is presently drive E:, and when i had the dvd burner hooked up the dvd drive took over E: and it had the hard drive as drive F:.
could that be causing the problem? and if so what should i do?
[ September 10, 2004, 05:27 PM: Message edited by: Strider ]
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
Well everything has worked out fine now. I was sort of an idiot. And i realized i had an extra IDE slot on the ATA card that i wasn't using. So i just hooked the extra hard drive and the dvd drive onto seperate busses completely, making them each a master. and everything is beautiful.