So today I decided I liked Windows 7 enough to reformat and make it my primary OS. Everything went smoothly except it could find my IDE hard drive I stole out of my old machine for some extra space. I decided to mess with it later. My computer then just randomly shut down. I started it back up and everything was the same, but still couldn't read my secondary hard drive. I then restarted and couldn't then detect my disc drives which are also IDE. Anyone know what is going on here?
How do you have the IDE drives jumpered? What model drives are they? My guess is you have one set to master, one to cable select (or both to master, or something similar).
Yeah, I'm using RC Build 7100. The odd thing was that when I was previously dual booting XP/7 the drive registered. Now that I'm only booting 7 after a reformat it's not recognizing it.
My two optical drives are on one ribbon, and my secondary hard drive is the only device on the ribbon, so I'd hope it'd be master. Considering it's previous functionality I hope it is. I'll check momentarily though.
OK, upon further inspection the drive is the slave. However it's the slave no matter if I put it at the first or second spot in the ribbon. Any help on switching this to Master so I can get my data's back?
There's the jumper (or at least there should be) on the back of the hard drive, next to the ribbon port. Follow the diagram on the front of the drive to determine which spot the jumper needs to be positioned to be either "Cable Select" or Master.
Something like this, but I don't know what position it should be in:
That is the back of a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9. See the pins just to the left of the 4 pin power connector? That's your jumper block for setting master/slave/cable select.
The top of the drive should show you how to jumper them:
If it has no jumpers on the pins, or if the jumper is going across two of the pins on top (storage position), it's going to come up as a slave. To force that drive to be master, take that jumper and put it on the two pins closest to where the ribbon cable plugs in. (Maxtors are ok with leaving the jumper as master even when used as a single drive). The top picture shows where the jumper would go for putting it in cable select (the position on the cable should determine if it's master or slave; I never use this myself).
Shit, upon inspection of my case, I found three dead box elder bugs, but no jumper. Is there a way I could just solder the two together or something instead?
well, I mean you could solder it together, but I wouldn't. Chances are good you have jumpers on stuff that are just in storage positions that you could use. You don't need both of those optical drives hooked up to do an install. Disconnect one and borrow its jumper; they should be the same size as the maxtor's.
OK, so jumper acquired from work. Plugged the guy in, BIOS recognizes the drive as a master. Upon Windows start-up, new device detected, installed properly, and it still doesn't show up in Windows.
Open Computer Management (start, run, compmgmt.msc). Look under the 'Storage' section for 'Disk Management'. Click on 'Disk Management'. It should show the drives in your computer, does it have listed? If you right click each Disk, and goto properties, you can get the name and manufacturer of the device.
Does it show up if you go into Disk Management? (Start button, type in "computer management" in the run box, push enter, click "Disk Management" on the left of the window that comes up)
You might have to format it to get it to appear in My Computer. Or just assign it a drive letter.
Alright, it does pop up in disk management. I think what might have happened know is that it was previously drive D. When I reformatted with Windows 7 if assigned D to the second partition of my primary drive, thus booting my secondary drive off of D.
