Drives Not Seen By Computer

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Fairuza

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First, the history.

Machine had three physical IDE drives onboard, until I stripped them out and did a fresh install of the O/S onto a virgin SATA drive.

These consisted of one primary master with the O.S. & program files - and two slaves for data storage. Can post specs later if necessary.

For the last few days, we've seen nothing but perfect performance with just this one SATA system/O.S. drive and nothing else.

With specific tasks for the old drives in mind, I have just replaced two of the old slaves.

This time, boot was slower than normal and an old visual glitch which occurred in the old configuration has reappeared. It's simply a a wide grey line which appears at the bottom of the screen(s) during the boot process. Something like a progress bar...

After boot up, the old drives are not visible in My Computer.


I believe they were formatted FAT32, whilst the new SATA is formatted NTFS (if that's any help?)

Have consulted the Device Manager. The IDE controllers are listed. Appears normal.

Have checked and double-checked integrity of all physical connections, both for power and IDE data cables.

The IDE drives run in series. The SATA is seperate (obviously!)

What could be wrong?
 
Thanks, no I didn't. I don't know where to find Disk Management but I have looked again in Device Manager... Under 'Drives' there is listed only my Maxtor SATA drive and the USB external one. No sign of the other two.
 
Click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.

In the console tree, click Disk Management.

See if they are showing up there.
 
Great! No sign of them there. Just the system drives and the USB one. (Both healthy, at least!)
 
Have you tried a different ide cable?
Checked jumper settings?
Installed chipset drivers?
Do they show in bios?
 
Jumpers are as they were, when they were set as slaves.

Chipset drivers, I don't know about.

I'll have a look in the BIOS on startup and let you know.
 
If they are on the same ribbon either set them both as cable select or set the one on the end as master and the one in the middle as slave.
 
Ah, okay. Thanks. I'll have a go at that, later. Let you know how I get on with it.

Setup is telling me that one of the IDE drives is set to master. I thought I had set it to slave when I first built the system.

Apparently, it finds the nearest available bootable drive...? That's probably it. I've probably got me jumpers in wrong.

The SATA doesn't have enough information on the label to tell me how to jump to slave/master. It just says something about limit to 1.5gb/s or something.

Is the way you set jumpers standard on all drives or does it vary, depending on make/model?

It was totally smooth running, with only the SATA. Now, performance is noticeably down since I reinstalled these two IDE drives. It's taking longer to boot, there are driver errors coming up; all sorts of things. The whole thing just doesn't feel right.
 
There are no master slave settings on sata drives. Some sata drives have jumpers to set if they are running at sata i or ii. You do not need to change any jumpers on your sata drive.

You just need to make sure the ide drives jumpers are set correctly as I previously stated. Either cable select for both or master for the end one on the ide cable and slave for the drive in the middle. Just because one of the ide drives is set as master does not mean it is your boot drive.
 
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