[Scrilla]

Just built a new system... Installed windows on my new 320GB SATA drive (which only shows as being 298 GB??) and it goes fine... but my other 2 IDE HDDS aren't showing on my computer. They are my old systems HDDs. The bigger of the 2 was my media drive and has all of my music and pictures and such as well as a lot of installed software (the installed software I don't mind losing.). The smaller one had windows and some stuff im not worried about retrieving. Seeing how it wasn't recognizing my HDDs I figured maybe the old system HDD set as master was somehow confusing things so I switched their positions on the ribbon and switched their jumpers as well. All to no avail. Anyone got any ideas on how to get my machine too see my beloved drives?

Edited by Scrilla, 14 November 2008 - 02:35 AM.

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If the ribbon is the 80-wire type as opposed to the old 40-wire type, make sure the master-jumpered drive is connected to the end ribbon connector, and the slave-jumpered drive connected the middle ribbon connector.

Edited by phillip22, 14 November 2008 - 04:17 AM.

[phillip22]

If the ribbon is the 80-wire type as opposed to the old 40-wire type, make sure the master-jumpered drive is connected to the end ribbon connector, and the slave-jumpered drive connected the middle ribbon connector.

Edited by phillip22, 14 November 2008 - 04:17 AM.

[Scrilla]

would it really matter though? they're both non-current OS holding drives... and yes... slave is in the middle.

Edited by Scrilla, 16 November 2008 - 09:06 PM.

[Neil Jones]

The way round the IDE cable used to matter and probably still does matter for some drives but any relatively recent drives and/or systems probably don't care which way round the cable goes as long as its plugged in. It doesn't matter if its a system drive or not, that doesn't enter into the equation.

Can the BIOS see the two IDE drives? If not, its usually either a board problem, a configuration problem or a cable problem.
If the BIOS can see the drives but Windows cannot, its a software problem with Windows.

298Gb usable of a 320Gb drive is normal due to the rounding. The drive is sized on 320 thousand megabytes RAW and unformatted with a Gb as 1000Mb. In actuality a Gb is 1024Mb, therefore the difference works out to about 22Gb. There's nothing wrong with the drive. A 500Gb drive "only" comes up as 465Gb and a terabyte drive (1000Gb) will probably come up as 930Gb or thereabouts.

[Scrilla]

thank you for the reply. The Drives do NOT show up in bios. What would be the next step in resolving this issue?

[Neil Jones]

Drives that don't show up in BIOS usually don't show up for one of three reasons:

1) IDE controller on the board isn't turned on is or faulty.
2) The drives are either both master or both slave. This can also be caused when one drive is master, the other is cable select but connected in such a fashion that the Cable Select drive would be a master. If you're using Cable Select it's a good idea to ensure the cable is the right way round - the two connectors close together connect to the drives.
3) The cable is defective or you're using Cable Select with a 40-way cable. 40-way cables do not support the Cable Select ideology for some reason. It's also entirely possible the hard drives are mislabelled so you may be causing a conflict without realising it. Connect one drive at a time and see what it comes up as.

[Scrilla]

Thanks again. How do I check to see if the IDE controller is on? None are using cable select and they're not both master or slave. The cable is the 80-way and is brand new. I guess I'll try them individually.