[katana]

last week i was given a computer with a P4 2.26ghz socket 478 processor, 512 mb DDR Ram, 128mb Asus video card and a Seagate Barracuda 60gb ATA hdd with win 98. i suspect the OS has lost files because it locks up a lot and is very slow. thats not the point though, so i put in my 2.4 ghz processor, but it didn't run any faster. but when i put in my WD 40gb hdd it claimes it couldn't read see the WD hdd (which i had set as master). but it would show up in the BIOS my WD hdd is an enhanced IDE drive. i want to have the 60gb hdd as the slave. will the ATA drive and the IDE drive work together? and might I need drivers for the mobo, because I couldn't find any.

Any help would be great,
James

[DreamHazard]

If you're still running windows 98, you may need to obtain the drivers for your drive. I'd suggest installing windows XP. That way, your computer should run faster, and should read the drive too. If your HDD is formatted to NTFS, windows 98 may not read it anyway.

Hope that's helped.

[katana]

installed XP and the computer runs faster now. i have also got 768mb ram in it now and it runs heaps faster and is more reliable. But it still can't read my WD HDD. And my wireless USB Adaptor is refusing to install.
BTW was USB 2.0 just a software upgrade or was it a hardware upgrade?

[philthomas]

Did you change the jumper to slave on your WD HDD ?, as you cant have 2 Masters

Having said that, if I am reading things right, you wanted to make the WD the Master and the Seagate the slave, so to achieve this, you may have to start over, swapping the drive jumpers and IDE cables.

[katana]

tried that.
now, because of the the crappy, unreliable USB ports, it won't read my MP3 player!

[philthomas]

What did you try ??

[whiskey]

I'd test the WDD drive, go the website and download the lifeguard tools. http://support.wdc.com/download/inde...id=999&swid=30
Choose either to make a floppy disk or a CD. Install the drive as a master alone by itself. Boot up the disc and follow the instructions to run a test. If it doesn't see the drive make sure it's optioned for master and check or replace your cable.

[katana]

i gave up on the WD and put it back in the HP computer i got it out of.
i also fixed the problem of the computer not rading my mp3 player by updating the usb drivers.

[whiskey]

Why don't you test with the lifeguard tools...the first test it runs is to see if the drive is properly installed and the cable is ok. Next is a 90 second test to see if the drive itself is ok. Lifeguard tools will only work with a Western digital drive.

Each manufacturer has it's own software for testing their drives but I've found maxtor (now seatools) seems to work on any drive. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...oads/seatools/

I don't find very many bad drives, but it's a good practice to test a drive before installing windows. One day I reformatted a drive because windows had crashed, it worked for awhile but I started getting blue screen errors. Could not figure out what was wrong. Well I finally tested the drive and found it was going bad. Sometimes drives will just crash, other times they gradually go bad.

You might want download the free Ultimate boot disc, it's really useful to have. Included are all the manufacturer's software to test each drive. It includes maxtor, toshbia, sony. western digital and many others. Also includes a lot of other stuff for cloning drives, and it can also test your RAM memory.

[katana]

ok, I'll try that