Hard drive boots in Master/Slave mode, but not by itself

irrumator11 · #1 25th Jan 2008, 20:14

I have two hard drives installed in my computer - a 120GB one and a 250GB one. Both have Windows installed on them. When I set the 250GB to Master, and the 120GB to Slave, the computer boots normally, and everything works. Now, I don't really need the 120GB drive, so I want to unplug it and just keep it inside the computer. I unplug the power plug form it, and the ribbon cable, leaving the jumpers in the same place on both drives. Then I try booting up the computer, and it says "No operating system found!" When I go into BIOS setup, with only the 250GB drive plugged in, it doesn't detect any hard drives at all. What am I doing wrong? Thanks for all your help.

**link590o** · #2 26th Jan 2008, 01:53

i had something similar happen with a dell 2400 series model.

i had two hard drives installed also. just as you described. a maxtor 40 gig, and a western digital 40 gig. it booted fine with both installed, or with just the western digital. but the maxtor made it go to crap.

i think what happened here is that the second drive is formatted in such a way that it isn't bootable by itself. i had the same exact problem. and i have no idea how to fix it. i was forced to just buy a new drive.

rf6647 · #3 26th Jan 2008, 10:27

Technically, it could be a signal reflection on the transmission line.
I suggest that you experiment. Use a cdrom drive as a slave on the same IDE. Check out the bios and see if this shows both devices.

A different experiment would connect the other IDE connector on the ribbon cable to the solo 250GB drive. This could change things, as well.

irrumator11 · #4 26th Jan 2008, 14:03

the 250 drive, whether set to master or to cable select and plugged into the end of the ribbon cable, just doesn't show up if it's the only drive that's connected. it shows up as master when the 120 is set to slave, it shows up as slave when the 120 is set to master, but it just doesn't show up when the 120 is not connected.
hmm, this does make it seem like i'm doing something wrong with the jumper settings, but i swear i've tried every possible combination of ribbon cable plugs and jumper settings, and still - nada.

rf6647 · #5 26th Jan 2008, 21:09

I can only testify that I experienced a similar problem when using a very vintage Western Digital Drive (40GB was huge back then). Without a slave on the IDE, the WD did not report to the bios. Mixing the HD and CDROM on the same IDE slows it down to the speed of the CDROM.

I never went so far as to reset the bios, since the bios could see any solo device, as long as, it was not the WD.

Link590 had a favorable experience with the WD, and gave up on the problem drive.

With these 2 pieces of conflicting symptoms, this points back to the mobo. All I can recall about the mobo for my case was that it was branded 'syntax' and it used the Via chipset. Let me know if you want me to dig back into the archives for more info.