Okay, i have two harddrives, one set to master, the other to cable select. i have had no problem switching the slave drive with another harddrive that i use to store my ps2 games on. Today i turned my computer off. removed the power plug from the back, and grounded the computer as i always do. I unplugged the slave drive, plugged in the ps2 slave drive, and plugged the power back in and turned it on. When i booted up it said it couldnt find the harddrive and asked if i wanted to go to setup. The setup menu showed nothing being plugged in there, and the harddrive was not moving at all (it vibrates when it is on). so i turned my computer back off, plugged in the old slave drive and now that one isnt working either. Does anyone have any idea on what is going wrong? I have even tried switching the ide cable. My slave drive gets power and makes all teh bootup noises it normally does, but my pc still doesnt recognize it, and says there is nothing plugged into the slave port. *EDIT* I have tried some other things. which included just plugging in the slave drive. it turns out it is the drive itself. for some reason windows does not recognize it as a harddrive anymore. Is this harddrive officially SOL? or is it repairable?
Remove the jumper from the rear of the drive and set it as 'slave' and not cable select and retry. Check in the BIOS during POST at the start by pressing, F2 or Delete (BIOS manufacturer dependent) and check that the drive is being detected their. If you use cable select you require a certain cable, and you should never have a 'master' and 'cable select' on the same IDE cable.
not sure if you read the message. I have not changed anything, there were no jumpers in there. which defaults to slave. these were in the same setting they were in for over a year, and i switched one slave with another slave, that i have done once before and it worked fine. and it didnt work. and now one harddrive does not power on anymore, and the other just shows up as an 'unknown device' in bios.
the bios will either show a drive or not but not an unknown device as that is windows which is totally different from the bios of the motherboard
Try a different 80 pin ribbon cable. I sounds like that may be the problem, if you are having trouble with any slave drive that you connect to it now. It doesn't matter if it worked a year ago. It may have gone belly up on you, now.
Yea, tried a brand new ide cable. ive determined it is the harddrive itself. i had an extra 40gb harddrive lying around and i hooked it up to the slave, it works fine. I hope theres a way to get the harddrive that isnt working up and running without reformatting/replacing. all my tv eps/anime, movies , games and music were on that HD ><. I will take the hd to a local mom & pop shop that has helped me out big time before. If they cant fix it, its still under warranty, so at least i can get a new one. Maybe this is a sign its time to trash this Dell...
thats what i planned on doing doing. The only original thing on this system is the processor, everything else has been upgraded, so it'd be a waste to buy a system with stuff i already have. Its a hard debate between AMD & Pentium. I hear many great things about AMD's, but the AMD 64 3500 chip only goes 2.2ghz while the same priced Pentium chip is over 3ghz.
it's like comparing a big rig to a drag racer. you can't rely on speed alone with AMD vs. Intel...don't make that mistake
