I recently purchased a 250GB Western Digital hard drive and after a bit of trouble getting to to be recognized I finally got all of the connections right except.

No matter what I do when I have both my hard drives connnected to my computer the WD 250GB is always the primary Master disk. Because of that it keeps trying to Boot from that disk and not my old Maxtor 80GB disk that I want to boot from.

So my questions are:

Is there a way to make my computer boot from the Primary Slave disk instead of the Master, or is there a way to edit the data on my Maxtor 80GB disk to make it appear as the Master...which it presently won't do.

Please any assistance no matter how basic may be of help.

I thank you in advance,
Vesence

Hi, Vesence welcome to SAF,

There are some ways to do what you want:

If the slave HD is cabled on the second IDE, you can access your BIOS settings and force it to boot from IDE1 instead of IDE0 - or, just change (invert) the cabling between the two HDs;

If your HDs are on the same IDE/cable, you must change the jumper settings and probably the cable position (first and second connector);

If you just want to Windows start on slave HD, you can install it on slave. In this case, boot sector will still be on master, but Windows will load from slave.

I think you'd better try the second option, change cable/jumpers to maintain your old HD as master and use the second as slave

Hope this will help.

If you need further assistance, please post back.

Chris

Hi Vesence,

First, do you have a full XP installation with Master Boot Record on each drive? Or not? In other words, at one time did both drives boot clean into XP in each one's respective case? Make double-dog sure that your 80gig definitely has a working MBR! You can check this by powering down and disconnecting the power cable only to the 250gig drive and rebooting. It Should now boot clean into the 80 gig because there is no alternative.
Be sure to do this and be sure it does boot before anything else.
Afterwards, power down and reattach the power cable to the 250 gig drive.

You did not mention if you did this or not, but take your two harddrives and put them on a single cable, the 80 gig on the end terminal, 250 gig on Middle (this actually is not necessary, but it will help you remember which is which a year from now when you peer inside your dark case). Set your jumpers on the rear of each: the 80 gig to Master, the 250 gig to Slave. Do not set either to CS (cable select). Make sure your BIOS has master harddrive as 2nd boot device ("A" drive is usually First Boot Device).
Okay, now try to boot. Hopefully the 80 gig will boot first.

If not, repost back.

I've tried a few things but I think my Jumper settings or the cable just might be defective...

I've tried doing the second option you gave me Ironbender, but even when the second hard drive is not connected it is showing up as slave and when I put the jumper shunt into the Master position I get a disk read error. I suppose I could just uninstall windows from the 250GB hard drive and reformat it...

Would that work, if the 250GB hard drive is empty, will it boot from the 80GB even if it shows up as a slave.

Also, they are on the same IDE cable and everything I've tried has been to no avail in terms of getting the 250GB to be a slave drive.

Thanks again,
Vesence

There are two very common reasons why a hard drive is ignored on bootup.

1. As ranchhand has mentioned, your jumpers may not be set properly, but with an EIDE cable (80wire 40pin) the connectors are color coded and if you set set both drives to Cable Select (default setting on new drives) and plug the Master into the end (black) connector and the Slave into the middle (grey) connector. In this configuration, the BIOS will recognize the drives as Master & Slave based on their connector position and if everything else is proper, then HDD 0 will be the drive that the system will look to for the boot files.

2. Even if you have everything correct as I described in point #1, the Master Primary Partition may not be ACTIVE and the Slave Primary Partition may be set as ACTIVE - in this case the BIOS will look to the Slave to boot from. If you swap their position, the BIOS will find the Primary Active Part & try to boot from that. The option is to make the Primary Part on the 80 gig drive as ACTIVE or remove the active notation from the other drive.

One thing you can try is to arrange the boot sequence (if the selections will allow it) so that instead of using HDD 0 (First Hard Drive - actually the first Master Primary), use HDD1 (the next hard drive in the pecking order). If you have this selection, this may be the easiest method of "flopping" between which HD you want to boot from - this is a very easy way to perform a multi-boot through the BIOS Selections.

QUOTE (Alfons @ Jun 28 2005, 04:23 PM)

One thing you can try is to arrange the boot sequence (if the selections will allow it) so that instead of using HDD 0 (First Hard Drive - actually the first Master Primary), use HDD1 (the next hard drive in the pecking order).  If you have this selection, this may be the easiest method of "flopping" between which HD you want to boot from - this is a very easy way to perform a multi-boot through the BIOS Selections.

This sounds like it may be the easiest thing for me to do...but being a complete windows/BIOS novice I really don't even know how to acess the BIOS to change anything. Also I think my BIOS might have an error because everytime I press ALT+F2 I get the screen that shows the individual disks and their config (Primary master, primary slave etc. But at the bottom in bold red (which is never good IMO) it says No FDD found, press ESC to return to POST screen.

Yeah it sounds like having BIOS look for the second disk and boot from that would work, but if anyone can walk me through it I'd be extremely appreciative.

Thanks in advance,
Vesence

Ok Vesence, will try this step by step...

First: you are running a system that was working fine with an (old) 80 Gb hard drive...

When you purchased a new 250 meg. Hd, you have installed it... I suppose that you had the Maxtor HD as primary master, and probably a CD reader as second IDE... this is the most common configuration.

When you installed the second HD, what did you do ? Have you connected it on the same cable as the Master HD ?

In this case, you must have set the 250 GHZ HD as Master, or Cable select... Or as Slave (no jumper on it)...

Assuming that you had a system working fine with the Maxtor 80, and you have some CD on IDE 1 (second IDE), you must have to set it as slave...

So, I suppose you have connected it on the same cable to the Maxtor original HD...

In theory, depending on what OS you are using, there's no problem, but, I bet there's a conflict somewhere...

I'll suggest you to connect the 250 MB HD on the second IDE port, and your CD/DVD as slave, on the first port, with your 80 GB Maxtor drive. Note that there are some jumper settings and cable issues that can lead you in trouble.

Chris
Those issues are always tricky to set, as any jumper/cable wrong setting may mess with all your system.

attaching the hard drive to the other IDE Cable sounds like a safe bet, but the IDE Cable with two connectors (attached to my 80GB hard drive) isn't long enough to reach from the hard drive to the CD drive...
*sigh* I feel so inept presently, I'll try rehooking the hard drives like you said but if there is an extender or something I should buy for the other IDE cable so it can reach from the HD to the CD that'd be great to hear about.

Thanks,
Vesence

QUOTE

I think my BIOS might have an error because everytime I press ALT+F2 I get the screen that shows the individual disks and their config

Some systems will acces the BIOS settings by tapping "Del" key on power up, others will access with F10 or F12, and some with a key combination...

What system are you using ? If you do not have an owner's manual, we can scout around for it.

By the way, do not feel inept. Knowledge must start from zero, and after some time, you will be an expert on this

QUOTE (Ironbender @ Jun 29 2005, 03:39 AM)

What system are you using ? If you do not have an owner's manual, we can scout around for it.

I'm using windows XP with SP2 on my 80GB Hard drive and that's what I'd like to be able to keep using, my BIOS I believe is like Pheonix or something (I'm away from my home computer as I am writing this, so I'm hoping I remember right)

Thanks...again:)
Vesence

I mean the computer make and model... I said system, sorry.

Thanks for all the help guys, I was able to get into my BIOS and change the boot order from HDD 0 to HDD 1 and now it works perfectly

Thanks a million, I'll be back if I need any more help with anything, you guys are all quite versed in these matters

*Hugs and thanks*
Vesence

You are always welcome, Vesence