External To Internal

[SinisterDeath]

Okay, this may sound wierd but bear with me here.

A while back I bought an External HDD for my **** notebook, becuase a 90GB hdd just isn't big enough when your constantly swapping out games, and other stuff.

Now that I got a desktop again, And with the pending open beta of Windows 7, I've been trying to partition my HDD I have in my computer with absolutely no luck. (I can't get MagicPartition, to partition, stupid error 27!)

So, Heres the question.

I took my external HDD, found that its a standard Sata/IDE 3.5" HDD, cracked open the case, found that it was indeed, the same type of connections my motherboard allowed/had room for.

So, I spend about 2 hours putting it in, re-arranging the wires, and all that fun stuff. Boot up. And then Its sitting at dectecting IDE hard drives for about 10 minutes, not finding the HDD. Like it knew 'something' was connected, but the device wasn't responding.

So, after fixing some bios I was able to login to XP (in under 20 minutes) and the question is this...

1) Is it possible the External HDD has some kind of 'protection' against being used as an Internal HDD even though they are both standard 3.5" HDDs?
2) Could I have simply missed a jumper on the back of the HDD?
3) Do I have to format it before it'll be recognized?
4) OR is it more likely I'm a complete idiot and just didn't get the connection tight enough?

I'm thinking its #2, but its probably #1 or #3. #4 is unlikely IMO, because everythigns 'tight', and yes the 'power' is plugged in...

 

[MrLinux]

Check the jumpers, both drives should be set to Cable Select, or one needs to be Master and the other Slave.

 

[SinisterDeath]

Well, I was playing around with it last night...

The New Hard Drive is on Cable Select.
However, the old hard drive, doesn't even have a jumper.

After some reboots, everynow and again, It'll detect the HDD. But its SLOW. VERY very Slow. And even if it does select it, I can't boot. Either I get an error saying Detecting Arrays, or Windows gets stuck loading... It got to the point I had to unplug the HDD just to boot my pc up...
It very well could be because of the jumperse I guess... Though I know I had this issue on another Hard drive (slow detecting, slow booting) on a hard drive that was failing..

 

[sturm]

Is the drive without the jumper a WD drive? I know many of them have to run without a jumper if in a single drive config. Try setting the old drive as master and the new drive as slave, if they're IDE drives. You didn't say for sure. Also reseat all the connections again.

 

[SinisterDeath]

Well, I think they are both Western Digital actually, one uses the SATA, one uses IDE. (one small connector, one big connector)
The 500GB HD I have with XP installed on it (now win7) didn't have a jumper in it. The 2nd HD I added to it, the 300GB one, had a jumper in the select place...

I've all but given up on it, but would a jumper in the wrong location, or two hard drives 'trying' to be the master, cuase a system to 'slow down' drastically? If so, I think its safe to say that the Jumper is definately the problem... I'd like to confirm, but I don't got any spare jumpers laying around...