Hard drive problems

[battletoads]

Help! I just swapped a 120gb Maxtor internal hard drive into my Mame PC from an older PC. On this hard drive is a lot of data that I would rather not lose. I connected the new drive as a slave to my WD master drive, taking care to use the correct jumper settings on both drives.

The hard drive popped up in 'My Computer' after the first boot up, but when I turn the PC off and then back on again, the drive ("Local Disk E" on my computer), was gone. If I open Control Panel--> Add New Hardware-->Already connected, and I click the Maxtor on the list of components, then close the 'Add New Hardware' dialog box, the drive pops up again, functioning perfectly. Turn the PC off, then back on again, and the drive is gone. This same cycle occurs every time I turn the PC off now.

How do I get the drive to stay permanently in My Computer?

[Brian Hoffman]

HMMMM......Should just work

goto control panel... Admininstrative Tools> Computer managment>Disk managment> Find your volume> Assign it a driveletter> Reboot.

Just dont fomat

goodluck

[chriss]

It sounds like you configured your hardware correctly but windows is missing to automount the volume at startup.

here are some things you can try:

- assuming you have ide drives because you are talking about master/slave you can try connecting the slave drive as secondary master.

- check your hard drive for errors. if your volume is mounted use chkdsk [drivename]: /f /v in the command line. windows will tell you that the volume will not be accessible anymore until restart if you do this

but to me your problem sounds like a driver mess since the hard drive is found via add new hardware. so probably another driver is hindering the volume to automatically mount.

that would give you the following options:

reinstall windows (probably not an option but the most effective by far)

reinstall chipset drivers (eg nvidia or via, you can find that out with cpu-z)

update bios to the most recent version

[battletoads]

Ok, so I tried Brian Hoffman's suggestion, and I also tried Chriss' suggestion to run chkdks, neither of those helped.

Next on my plate is I am going to try Chriss' idea of making the Maxtor a master as well, and if that doesn't work I am going to try and find updated chipset drivers. By 'Secondary Master' did you mean make both drives 'Master'?

I should mention I suppose that both drives are on the same ribbon cable, with the master plugged in on the end of the cable, and the slave plugged in to the plug halfway down the length of the same ribbon. That is the correct way to do it, right? Both drives are IDE, i'm running XP SP2.

More ideas? I'd rather not wipe windows, there must be an easy fix for this considiering the drive pops up and works perfectly the moment I pick it in the 'Add New Hardware' dialog.

EDIT: So a few more things to add to the symptom list.

- Scanning for drives with Maxtor's Seatools also gets the drive to popup in My Computer.

- If I get the drive to show up with Add New Hardware or Seatools, then restart, the drive STAYS.

- If I Turn Off, the drive goes away.

[chriss]

this is definately a weird problem you have... did you check if your bios is the newest revision? (download cpu-z, click on mainboard, note your manufacturer and model, check on the manufacturers site for bios updates)

to assign both drives to the same IDE cable should work fine but you can both make them master on both IDE ports. You should have two IDE ports on your mainboard. If not, then your mainboard is one of the newer generations which only have one IDE port.

do you have other drives you can try out? if these would work without an issue, then there could be something wrong with your hard drive. if the same error happens with other drives then ther is probably something wrong with windows...

[Brian Hoffman]

I dont think its the bios for 1 reason. But I do for other reasons.

1.) It sees the HD after going into add hardware in windows. If the BIOS didnt see the harddrive then it wouldnt matter.. Windows wouldnt either.

With that said Id still go into the bios and see if itis set to autodetect the drive on that bus or if youcan press enter and have it fill in the data.. This way when your PC bootsup it isnt querying your hardware it just assumes it exists.

So in windows you have a C drive a D drive (probably a cdrom device) is it assigning E to the new HD?

Do you have memory card readers that want to use that drive letter and are unmounted because no mediua is in them?

Does Diskmanagment see the drive before you add new hardware?

Are you logged in as Administrator?

Its strange when you say it works on a reboot but not a cold start... That leads me to think its a bios issue. Is the jumper on the back of the drive on SLAVE or CS (cableselect) Id try switching it from one to the other..

And yes if youdo have 2 IDE slots use the second and set the drive as master. This will help with performace and writing data between drives.

The cd rom can remain a slave on the secondary IDE channel if its available.

[battletoads]

Ok so after a few busy months away from MAME, I decided to look at this hard drive again. I simply removed the jumper from the slave drive altogether and now it works perfectly. I guess technically it's not set as 'slave' anymore, but it works fine now and before it kept disappearing. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

[mhilditch]

Ok so after a few busy months away from MAME, I decided to look at this hard drive again. I simply removed the jumper from the slave drive altogether and now it works perfectly. I guess technically it's not set as 'slave' anymore, but it works fine now and before it kept disappearing. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

For most brand HDDs the jumper settings for slave are "no jumpers". You may have had it set to "cable select" with the jumper on it.