[Jon DeMassey]

I'm on XP2000 home, Samsung HDD 36GB. worked perfectly
Installed new Liteon DVD drive 3 months back; worked perfectly right up tp Christmas Day.

Christmas day
- Bought new Hitachi Deckstar 3.5, 160GB for the kids as Christmas present.
- Attempted to install it as slave to Samsung.
- Followed Hitachi manual instructions, including configuring jumpers correctly as per the instruction manuals, while leaving Samsung HDD at original jumper settings
- inserted installation CD.

Now:-
(1) PC loads up, completes memory check (OK), which suggests the motherboard has not been blown, BUT
(2) PC stalls at "DETECTING IDE DRIVES....".
(3) There now appears to be no power running thru the DVD drive (although 4-pin power connections are all connected) and I cannot open it to extract the installation CD without breaching the warranty. Therefore cannot install and use reboot disk.
(4) Disconnected new Hitachi Deckstar and returned PC to original setup.....
(5) Still the PC loads up , completes memory check (OK), but stalls at "DETECTING IDE DRIVES...."

PC is Time Computers, in receivership, so I have no support to phone up. Am now using borrowed PC tower to access internet. Now the kids have no Christmas present from me!

CAN ANYBODY HELP PLEASE!

Jon DeMassey
Email address removed by Mod: Murray (Spammers watch these forums just in case someone is foolish enough to post their email address.. )or in the Geekstogo forum.

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Howdy and welcome to G2G:

First of all, which IDE cable did you install the new hdd on - the Primary or the Secondary ??

Which IDE connection is the DVD drive on??

Is the IDE cable the new hdd connected to an 80wire/40 pin cable (it has to be for this size a hdd) ??

Murray

[Murray S.]

Howdy and welcome to G2G:

First of all, which IDE cable did you install the new hdd on - the Primary or the Secondary ??

Which IDE connection is the DVD drive on??

Is the IDE cable the new hdd connected to an 80wire/40 pin cable (it has to be for this size a hdd) ??

Murray

[Jon DeMassey]

Thanx Murray for replying

The original HDD (Samsung) is connected as master and the new HDD (Hitachi 160GB) as the slave.

The (new) Hitachi states the jumper config as A-B, G-H master and A-B, C-D slave. However the (original) Samsung states its own particular master jumper config as A-C, G-H, so we left it as it is and configured the Hitachi slave A-B, C-D exactly as it instructed. I believe that if we re-configure the Samsung A-B, G-H as Hitachi suggest it will screw up the BIOS; am I right?

With regard to the IDE connection order (being the only thing we CAN access from the Setup and even then only when we disconnect the slave drive) it was DVD - Floppy - Hard disk. We tried changing it to HD - Floppy - DVD but it made no difference.

Note specifically that the original setup worked perfectly until we tried installing the new HDD. Since then it will not get past "detecting IDE drives" even when the new HDD is removed and the PC returned to its previous state. Even the DVD drive seems to have no signal going through it!

If we had blown the motherboard with a static short I reckon the setup would not even get as far as searching for IDE drives. Am I right?

Help!!!

Jon DeMassey

Edited by Jon DeMassey, 26 December 2005 - 12:29 PM.

[Murray S.]

"With regard to the IDE connection order (being the only thing we CAN access from the Setup and even then only when we disconnect the slave drive) it was DVD - Floppy - Hard disk. We tried changing it to HD - Floppy - DVD but it made no difference."

I think you misunderstood me here.. I am not asking what the boot order is in setup (BIOS).. I am asking where in the system the actual physical connections are being made..

Also, do you have an 80wire/40pin IDE cable for the new hdd?? If not, get one as the old 40/40 cables won't work!!

Murray

[Jon DeMassey]

Hi Murray

The cable is connected - blue (start) >motherboard - grey (middle) >slave - black (end) >master.

Yes all three cable connections are 80-pin. So is the DVD drive cable at both ends.

Jon DeMassey

[gerryf]

So, master (samsung 36gb) is connected at the end of the ribbon, not middle, and is the only drive presently on the cable?

[Jon DeMassey]

Thanx2 every1

I swapped around the cables from the DVD drive to the HDDs. It worked

I don't know how because we NEVER disconnected the DVD cable thru all the new HDD installation so it could not have been connected to the wrong one! Yet somehow the IDE connections semed to swap over. It is as if the BIOS reset itself to a new config!

Now I have another query thread entitled "Can I convert FAT32 to NTFS without backing up"

[Murray S.]

Glad to hear you got your initial problem fixed !!

As for the new one, normally you can make the conversion with no worries, but, anything can go wrong.

The word of the day here would be : backup !! Backup all personal docs, etc and then run the conversion..

Murray