Second hard drive issue.

[337]

Hi, I'm having a little bit of trouble with my second hard drive. My computer is an Athlon 2.0ghz with a SATA2 primary hard drive, and IDE secondary hard drive.

After a fresh reinstallation of XP, my computer was not able to read my secondary IDE hard drive. no pins where changed whatsoever.

It originally had not shown up in disk management even after a rescan of the drives. I've also checked all the wires.

The only way I was able to get it to work was to repin both the dvdrom and the secondary hard drive as slaves on the IDE cable since any other way it would choose the secondary IDE HDD as master over the primary SATA2 - Or the IDE HDD would not register at all.

Now with both dvdrom and secondary IDE HDD pinned as slaves, I get an 'ATAPI incompatable' message every time I start the computer. I doubt it is reffering to the dvdrom since I still get the message even when the dvdrom is disconnected.

Please help, it gets annouying having to press F1 everytime I want to boot up my computer.

Thanks.

 

[berry120]

You shouldn't be setting them both to slaves - you might be able to turn off the warning somewhere in the BIOS but this isn't really getting to the heart of the problem and even if it works it'll only be a bodge

When the disk wasn't showing up previously, you say you've checked the jumpers but have you also checked the drives' positions in the IDE cable? The master should be on the end and the slave should be in the middle. Also, have you got two IDE channels available or just the one? If it's two, then can you plug the two drives as masters into separate channels rather than in the same one?

One thing that I'm confused by is this:

...since any other way it would choose the secondary IDE HDD as master over the primary SATA2

What do you mean by this? SATA doesn't have the concept of master or slave drives, this is an IDE thing. Do you mean the drive wasn't detected at all, or something else?

If it's a case of you set your drives up correctly and windows put your IDE hard drive as C:\ and your SATA as D:\ or something similar, then shout - that can be fixed pretty easily.