Second Hard Drive Installation gone wrong

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emceedrive

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Built my own pc a few years back and was running low on HD space. Decided to install a second hard drive and now by bios will not recognize either the new drive or the old one either. I had to do a lot of shuffling around inside the computer case because I was running low on physical room to place the actual drive. I had to take out a dvd drive and its possible that I plugged the remaining dvd burner and the old hard drive in different combinations that I did before. Could that cause this? If not, what can? Im a complete moron and didn't backup my old hard drive, so unless I can find a way to get that drive to boot, i lose all my old storage.

Come on people, suggestions? I'm preeeety desperate at this point
 
Try reverting back to the old setup and see if you can get it working. If you did several steps at once, try doing it one step at a time and see what breaks down. I'm not entirely sure what you did, but check to make sure the drives are powered and they have data cables to the motherboard.
 
Your solution will depend on if the drives are SATA or IDE.

SATA: all you need to do is ensure that your hard drive with the OS is on controller 0. There are no jumpers or anything of the sort, you just need to ensure that the OS (or any OS for that matter) is on the first controller.

IDE: this isn't as easy. There are a few things people can go off here, and depending on your cabling it can go either way. I would first try to put both drives jumpers on cable select, then put the drive with the OS in the middle of the IDE chain, then the second hard drive at the end. If that doesn't work, keep the drives in the same place but place the jumps in the setting of master for the middle drive, and slave for the end drive. Always avoid putting a CD/DVD drive on the same controller as a hard drive.

This should resolve you issue.
 
Actually, with Sata, you can plug the OS drive into ANY sata port on the board, you just have to tell the bios which drive to boot from. If its IDE, you get to figure out which is master, which is slave, make sure they are in the right order, yada yada. So glad IDE is basically no longer used.
 
heh, thats why I get a sata hard drive, and an ide dvd burner.

Although I never had problems using both ide sata, and dvd burner on the same ide.
 
check the jumper selections. they cannot BOTH be master after all lol. whichever one you want it to boot from should be your primary master in your bios settings. the other one should either be slave to it or secondary master, although I think that secondary master is actually supposed to be for main CD/DVD drive. cherios!
 
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