Mayor PC booting trouble

[KillerHERTZ]

I have recently bought a new (to me) PC.

P4 1.8ghz and I have added a Seagate 160gb HD to it.

All was well until the other day it stopped reading ether at the boot screen:

'Deteching primary & secondary..........none' etc etc.


When I connect them to the PC, the PC stopps reading the 2 DVD drives and keeps the HD activity light on and does nothing.

Why would connecting the HDs do this? and how can I get the PC to read them again.

Im sure its somthing to do with the BIOS, I have checked all are on auto etc.

Help!

 

[frog1520]

I have recently bought a new (to me) PC.

P4 1.8ghz and I have added a Seagate 160gb HD to it.

All was well until the other day it stopped reading ether at the boot screen:

'Deteching primary & secondary..........none' etc etc.


When I connect them to the PC, the PC stopps reading the 2 DVD drives and keeps the HD activity light on and does nothing.

Why would connecting the HDs do this? and how can I get the PC to read them again.

Im sure its somthing to do with the BIOS, I have checked all are on auto etc.

Help!

Hi mate,

A couple of questions. Are you saying this was connected and working OK, and then suddenly stopped? Or has it never worked?

If its suddenly stopped, did you change anything?

It sounds like you have 2 disk drives, and 2 x DVD drives. So you're probably using a master and slave on each of your 2 IDE controllers, to give you the full 4 devices.

Is each device jumpered correctly to either MASTER / SLAVE, or CABLE-SELECT?

Are you sure your cable is plugged in the right way around? Newer cables are keyed so they only attach the correct way - i.e. red wire goes to pin 1 on both the motherboard and the device. Older cables will fit any way, and if you get it the wrong way around, the machine will hang on detection and the lights will stay on!

Let us know how it goes mate - good luck

 

[Sp!ke]

Good advice from frog but I'd add that you should make sure your HDD with the boot partition is set up correctly in the Bios as Primary Masteras well as on the jumper.

I suspect that you just need to swap cables around a bit & check jumper settings.

What you should have is 1 HDD and one optical drive hanging off each ide cable (assuming its IDE & not SCSI or SATA) and not two HDD's one the same IDE cable as this will slow down performance anyway.

 

[KillerHERTZ]

Frog, your genius!

Because my primary HD is old (12gb) it allows you to insert the Cable ether way, and I had never noticed this

Thanks again!, and to spike... I may your help again as I cant make the new HD the main system one...