Drive problems

[gbpec7]

I have this drive problem that I need a little assistance with.
I have a hard drive as primary master and a zip drive as primary slave.
I have a CDRW as secondary master and a DVD-Rom as secondary slave.

Originally I wanted to add a controller card and add another hard drive by putting the HDD's on the ATA100 card and the zip on primary master and leave the optical drives where they're at.

I kept getting errors with the Promise ATA100 card, the card finds the drives fine but I get an error message telling me "searching for boot record from IDE-0....ok
Boot sector not found. Please insert a bootable cartridge and press any key."

Ok, so I change it and put both HDDs, (on the same cable btw), back on Primary on the mobo and put the zip drive on the card, now it can't get past it to boot so I take that card out and put in another ATA100 card in and reinstall the hard drives to the card and the zip to primary and the same thing happens.

So by now I'm getting a little steamed so I unplug the zip from the primary and boot to the BIOS and make NO drives to the primary and then try to reboot.....it boots up fine but it don't see the slave HDD .

Well shoot......so I just pull the ATA100 card out and put the 2 HDDs back on the primary and leave the zip un-pluged (I don't use it much anyway) and it boots fine and windows finds all the drives.

Here is the problem...I have 2 hard drives 2 optical drives and 1 virtual drive, for reading ISO images.

• 40 gig HDD (C)
• 30 gig HDD (G)
• CDRW (E)
• DVD (F)
• Virtual Drive (H)

I can't seem to get the P/S drive to change to "D", the zip was D: but it's not there anymore.
Shouldn't the P/S automatically change to D drive?

I'm using XP Pro.

[twiztidtruckie]

I have a similar setup as you do

~80gig (C: )
~40gig (E: )
~cd-rw (F: )
~dvd (G: )
~20gig (H: )

now its like this after i formatted:

~80gig (C: )
~40gig (D: )
~cd-rw (E: )
~dvd (F: )
~20gig (H: )

No G: LOL....i dunno why but no biggie i guess...

I happen to have the same problem a few days ago. I ended up reformating both HDD's for a fresh install, and that had corrected it. I am not suggesting you do that, but that is how I fixed the problem.

Are you using a promise controller card? I had to update mine to run the 20gig, maybe that has something to do with it too? Just an idea anyway.

EDIT: Maybe going into the bios and seeing if the old zip drive is disabled, then maybe it will reset the P/S as the D:?

EDIT 2: When in the bios run the auto detect for the drives...maybe that could correct the malfuntion...

[gbpec7]

Originally posted buy twiztidtruckie
EdIT 2: When in the bios run the auto detect for the drives...maybe that could correct the malfuntion...

I have all the drives in the BIOS set to Auto.

I was using a promise card but removed it because of the problems stated above. I would like to use it so i can have all my drives working.

[twiztidtruckie]

Did you happen to update it over the net? I forget where I went to get updates for my card, but I will try and find it again.

Did you redetect the drives anyway? When I installed the 20 gig on my controller card, everything got messed up and I just redetected them all anyway, and it fixed it for me. Then to get my promise card running right I had to update the driver for it. Then all was ok, except my G: drive (which was a 2112mb hdd).

Truckie

[MaxVal]

First, in order to boot from a disk controlled by an add in card you usually need to select SCSI as the boot disk type.
Second, the order that Windows assigns hard disk letters has to do with the partition type. All primary partitions will be first, extended after, removable, and then optical.

[gbpec7]

MaxVal, I have both hard drives with primary dos partitions on them. What partition should I use for a storage drive?

ok, so what you're saing is after i install the ATA100 card I should change the boot sequence to boot from SCSI instead of IDE:0?

[MaxVal]

If both drives are primary, there are other issues in play.
The partition type for a storage drive is unimportant. I generally partition my disks with a primary and extended, with one logical drive. I store all my data on the logical drive, along with neccessary drivers and windows setup files. I then create a compressed image of my C: drive (Norton Ghost) and store it there also. Obviously, the logical drive is larger than the primary.
If I manage to corrupt the O.S. badly I simply restore the image to the Primary partition

In order to boot from the Promise card, most machines need to be set to boot SCSI.

I have used a fair number of Promise Ultra 66 controllers in mostly older machines with excellent results!

This may be of help
http://www.buildorbuy.org/driveassign.html

[gbpec7]

Originally posted buy twiztidtruckie
Did you redetect the drives anyway? When I installed the 20 gig on my controller card, everything got messed up and I just redetected them all anyway, and it fixed it for me. Then to get my promise card running right I had to update the driver for it. Then all was ok, except my G: drive (which was a 2112mb hdd).

I went back into the BIOS and I don't really have that option, I am running an AMIBIOS with the latest HoneyX update, I don't know if it is because AMIBIOS don't have that feature, but AwardBIOS does.
I went into Standard CMOS Setup and went to each drive and auto detected each drive and it still says primary slave is G:

[dustyrun]

I am running 2 x 120gig HD's and a 40 gig on a promise ATA100 and my 2 burners and 1 player on the mainboard ide.
MaxVal is 100% correct in that the bios has to have SCSI selected or it will not reconize the card.

Rick

[gbpec7]

Thanks MaxVal, I followed a link on the page you sent me to and I got it changed to D:.

Thanks for all the helps guys