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Making new HDD and adapter card work with old HDD

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Anonymous

I bought a new Maxtor 40GB HDD (D540X-4K, Ultra DMA 100 5400 RPM) and the Maxtor Ultra ATA/100 PCI Adapter card with it. I already have a 13 GB Maxtor (which is a coincidence) HDD in my pc hooked up with on-board primary IDE controller as Pri-Master. I have a CD-ROM drive and a CD Burner hooked up on Secondary controller as Sec-Master and Slave respectively. The BIOS is Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG ( 2A69KD4FC , 04/08/99 ). I installed the ATA card and formatted HDD with MaxtorBlast utility that comes with HDD. I have Win98 and am able to see the drive at D: from windows explorer. The HDD is connected as slave on the ATA card. My problem is this:
I am not able to use the new drive as Primary Slave. The HDD manual says that I need two jumpers to make it slave where as the sticker on HDD says I need only one jumper and the drive came only with one jumper which I have set up as slave. If I connect the new HDD as pri-slave with the on-board controller, the BIOS is not able to detect it (which I think is obvious since it is UDMA 33). I can hookup the drive as slave on the new adatper card and it works fine. If I hookup the pri-master as the master on the new adapter card, it won't work; the BIOS says Primary Master Failure ( don't remember the exact message). If the old HDD is on on-board controller and pri-master and the new one is on the new adapter as slave it works fine: the BIOS detects the pri-master, doesnt detect slave (since I kept it as AUTO detect in BIOS, tried none too and still works with next step), the Promise technology BIOS on adapter card kicks in and detects the new HDD, the system starts and config shows pri-master, none for slave, the two CD drives (ROM and RW) on Secondary, Win 98 starts and I can see the new drive as D:. I'll like to be able to use both the drives together as master and slave. I plan to use two different OS on both the drives and switch one to pri and other to slave as and when needed.
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

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So when you move your old hard drive over to the controller card you are going to need to set your motherboard BIOS under 'Standard CMOS Setup' to 'None' or 'Not installed' for the Primary Master, Slave, ect. Once you have that set make sure your boot sequence is set to boot to A, C, CD ROM/SCSI. As long as you set all that at that config I think you should be able to boot up. If not it could be an issue with the OS working on this card because of different LBA translations, and you'll have to reinstall if you want it working on the card ....

This is off Maxtor's FAQ :::
Q: How do I make my existing hard drive boot when connected to the Ultra ATA 100?

A: Boot the system with a system boot diskette.
If this is possible:
Can you access the hard drive?
Can you run programs from the hard drive?
Can you copy files to and from the hard drive?
If you answered yes to these questions, the MBR (Master Boot Record) on the hard drive is unreadable for some reason. The following will procedure will help you reset the MBR:
NOTE: Maxtor recommends that you backup critical data before continuing with this procedure.

MBR Fix:
Boot the system with a system boot diskette. This will take you to the A: prompt.
From the A: prompt, type "FDISK /MBR" and press [Enter]. The MBR will be transparently fixed and you will be returned to the A: prompt.
Type "SYS C:" and press [Enter]. This will transfer the system files from the floppy disk to the hard drive.
If you answered NO to Questions 1 - 3 or if the MBR Fix does not resolve the problem, then you are experiencing a conflict due to a slight difference between the LBA translation of your motherboard and that of our card. The only way you will be able to get around it is to repartition/reformat your hard drive while it is connected to the Ultra ATA 100 card.

Hope that helps ...

<font color=red>"Can you deal with that!"</font color=red>

It seems to me that you may have a misunderstanding of what is a master and what is a slave. Each IDE channel will have its own master and slave. If you only have ONE drive on any channel then that drive is always a master and the jumper should be set to master.

Assuming that the 13G drive was what you were using before you installed the new drive, I would put it back the way it was before, i.e. as a master on the primary IDE channel. Then I would connect the new drive to the ATA100 card and set it as a MASTER. When you start your computer your old C: should be the same as it was before and the new drive should be D:.

Does this help, or am I more confused than you.

:smile: <font color=green><b>Change the sig of the week!</b></font color=green> :smile:
Anonymous

Thanks for the suggestion. I set the pri-master and slave in BIOS as None and Boot Sequence to C, A, SCSI (The ATA adapter shows up under SCSI controllers in Device Manager). The old drive is connected as Master on the card and the new one as Slave (Both on channel one). The system boots up fine. Only one hitch (though its not a big deal), when the config box shows up while booting, it shows None for Primary Master and Slave HDD ( Shows CD drives on secondary properly). I understand it is because I set up both the drives as None in BIOS. Is there a way for the HDDs on ATA adapter to show up in the config box ? Why does the HDDs on new adapter card doesn't show up ? I am just curious to know :)  Since the HDDs work fine, it doesn't really bother me.
Thanks again for the reply, Lars :-)
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The drives aren't going to detect on the normal AWARD BIOS screen. What you should be getting after the BIOS POST is a screen that says "Maxtor Ultra ATA100 Controller" and will have a little wheel that rotates and says "Detecting"? Then it should list Primary Master on the Card as "D0", Primary Slave as "D1", the Secondary Master as "D2", and the Secondary Slave as "D3". It should show both you hard drives on the card instead of the Motherboard BIOS because the card has it's own BIOS that controls just the drives.

Hope that helps!?!

<font color=red>"Can you deal with that!"</font color=red>
Anonymous

It shows exactly what you said Lars, first Detecting and then the Two Hard Drives. What I was talking about was the current config box after that which shows Pri Master and Slave, Secondary Master and Slave etc... The HDDs doesn't show over there and I was curious to know why. My understanding is that all the information in that box is from BIOS settings and since the Pri Master and Slave are set as None in BIOS it shows the same in the config box.
Thanks for your help Lars, I really appreciate it :) 

Which you assumption is correct! It's only going to detect in the spot I explained in the last Post. You can install other things to the Motherboard controllers and they will show up in the spot that you are asking about, but at this point they are set to 'None' so there isn't going to be anything there ...

<font color=red>"Can you deal with that!"</font color=red>

The HDD's are not shown as Primary Master and Slave because they are not connected to the Primary channel on the motherboard. Your HDD's are connected to the ATA100 controller card. The terms "Primary Master and Slave" refer to devices connected to the Primary channel on the motherboard. There are no devices on the Primary channel, thus the None for Master and the None for Slave.

:smile: <font color=green><b>Change the sig of the week!</b></font color=green> :smile:
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