Problem booting my comp, relating to HD's I think

[jolla]

Hey!

I bought a new HD but I now have problems booting my computer. Before the new HD, I had IBM DeskStar 40gb set as master and some 8gb Seagate Medalist Pro set as slave in the same cable and everything worked well.

Then I bought Maxtor DiamondMax 9+ 120gb 8MB and I first set it as master. I divaded it into 2 partitions (20gb and 100gb) and installed Windows XP Pro on that 20gb partition. Of course I had Windows also on the IBM HD so I set it as slave (they were both connected to the same cable) and formatted it. Everything was ok.

But then I tried to start my comp on the next day, it didn't boot. When loading Windows it rebooted itself. I went to bios and it said: Maxtor - primary master, IBM - primary slave, Plextor cd writer - secondary master, cd-rom - secondary slave. All were set to auto. So everything was ok there. I have both hd's connected to the same cable and i have another cable for the roms. From bios I changed primary slave (IBM) to none and rebooted, didn't boot. Then I went to bios again and set it to auto, it booted normally and everything was normal, all drives worked fine. I rebooted my comp and everything worked great again. Then in the next day, same problem, didn't boot. I took my old cd rom drive off so I hade only my plextor cd writer in the other cable. Didn't help. Went to bios and set primary master (plextor) from auto to none. Didn't help. Set it back to auto and it rebooted normally now. Everything worked great. Rebooted and it worked well again.

Then again on the next day...blaah, didn't boot. So I took of the IBM slave drive. And yes, now it worked great. Tried next day and it booted. But why doesn't it work with both drives? Maxtor was all that time selected (by jumpers) as Device 0 Master and IBM as 16-pin (or whatever,not 15 anyways) slave. So then i put both as cable select (black connector goes to maxtor and grey to IBM as they should i think) and tried. It just didn't help either. Everything works well if i take the ibm drive off.

Any ideas what might be wrong? Thanks for any help!

 

[Crashman]

Does your BIOS offer IDE drive detection, to set your drives from "auto" to the drive type it detects?

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[jolla]

Yes it has auto detection feature as well. But if it's set to "auto" then auto detection doesn't change anything since it gets the same values and stuff for the hd as there already was. There was also a thing called "access mode" or something with values auto, LBA and some other i dont remember. It's set to auto as well.

 

[Crashman]

Nah, I was refering to a feature found on a lot of old BIOS that was called "IDE Auto Detection" or something like that, it would allow you to have your drive detected and lock that value in BIOS if you liked. I used it a lot to make computers boot faster, by having BIOS lock the value for the hard drive and setting the other channels to "none".

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Crashman]

Nah, I was refering to a feature found on a lot of old BIOS that was called "IDE Auto Detection" or something like that, it would allow you to have your drive detected and lock that value in BIOS if you liked. I used it a lot to make computers boot faster, by having BIOS lock the value for the hard drive and setting the other channels to "none".

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>