Now, I have just purchased two 200GB ATA drives. Just to test if they worked, I set them up like this:
Channel 1: 120GB (where system is installed) master, 200GB slave
Channel 2: 200GB master, DVD burner slave
First problem I'm having is on boot up with the BIOS. I went into the BIOS, to the IDE section, and have set the master/slave for each IDE properly (i think). The name of each drive shows up next to each label correctly. For each there's some settings inside that I don't know about, so I left those on auto. When I boot up, it says something like "Auto detecting Primary Master...HDD" or something similar. This used to do it really fast and detect both the 120GB and dvd burner. With the additional drives, it takes quite a while. The primary (channel 1) are found very fast, while the secondary (channel 2) take a while to find. All drives are set via jumpers to the proper master/slave. Once in windows, they show up properly and I can use Partition Magic 8 or the built in disk manager in windows XP's "management".
The only thing I can think of is this: Because of my case configuration, putting the DVD burner and a hard drive on the same channel has some physical issues. Basically, if I connect the end of the cable to the board, I connect the middle or the other end to the hard drive (it's closest), I then can't reach the dvd drive. I've tried moving the dvd drive down a few rungs and the hard drive up a few, but it still didn't work. So, I tried flipping the cable around. One end is plugged into the mobo, a short bit of cable, middle is plugged into a hard drive, then the long bit of cable, the other end plugged into the DVD drive. Again, hard drive is jumped to master, DVD drive to slave.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Boom
Relevant System Specs:
AMD Athlon64 3700+ soc939
ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard
1 x 120GB 8mb cache ATA WD HDD
2 x 200GB 8mb cache ATA Seagate HDD
DVD burner
Floppy Drive
Edited by BoomShake007, 19 March 2006 - 02:07 PM.
Sign In
Create Account
