Help - Hard Drive and IDE cables!

[TomZeBomb]

Ok. I recentley had two hard drives working. I took my "Storage" hard drive out so I could install windows on another one because the other computer wouldnt boot from the CD. Anyways, when I try to put my "Storage" Hard drive back on it doesnt seem to work. Sometimes it gives me weird characters in it reads the drives on startup and other times it wont start.

Could this possibly be bad IDE cables? Right now im running my main hard drive off of my slave.

Thanks.

 

[mikesgroovin]

Could be....but most likely it is the placement.
Can you give me a description of how the drives are connected to the IDE controllers?
There should be labels on your motherboard for "IDE1" and "IDE2". Also, give us a layout of which drives are on which portion of the IDE cable.

Thanks,
-Mike

 

[ekÆsine]

did you place the hard disk on the same cable you took it from?

did you remember to put the jumper back to the original setting if you changed it?

 

[TomZeBomb]

Well, one of the reasons I think it may be bad ide cables is because when the pc boots up and it lists the primary master slaves etc etc, if i have them both plugged in, the primary slave is all weird characters you dont normally see... almost like chinese.

Ill get back to you on the info you asked for, thanks in advance.

 

[TomZeBomb]

Heres an update:

My main hard drive is plugged set to primary master on its jumpers, and plugged into the middle clip on the ide cable, NOT the end clip. However, in bios it is loaded as the Primary Slave drive. When I try to put it on the far end clip, it doesnt detect anything (Yes, I chekced if i may have plugged it in backwards). Bad IDE cable?

Also an extra question:
I recentley took a harddrive out of a computer that wouldnt load from the cd and bootdisks didnt work, and put it on my computer so I could install xp on it. Everything went fine (Except my second hd wont work now) but when I put the newly installed xp harddrive into its old computer, it gives me a NLTDR error. Could this be because its known as the F drive instead of a C drive?

Thanks once again, in advance.

 

[TomZeBomb]

Bump.

Any ideas anyone?

 

[genistas]

Well, if it's anything like windows 2000 (and it pretty much is) Windows XP can not simply move from one computer to another like windows 98 can. It's all about the HAL. However, the NTLDR isn't the error I'd expect to get. Oh well.