OS won't recognise harddrives

[mysts]

Trying to help a neighbor with this problem.
He just installed winxp on a freshly formated drive which works just fine.
When he connected the D and E drives it won't boot at all. The drives are connected as secondary master and slave
Disconnect the D and E drives and it boots just fine.
Any help would be muchly appreciated.

[redwudz]

Have you tried each drive individually?

Does it get as far as the first black startup screen? You may be able to boot into BIOS and check the drives. (Click the 'Delete' key at the first screen.)

If it doesn't get that far, try a different IDE PATA cable, make sure one drive is jumpered to 'Master' and the other to "Slave'.

[Richard_G]

As redwudz says, make sure the jumpers are set correctly, one as Master one as Slave. On some drives there is also a Slave Present jumper. If that drive is being used as Master and this jumper isn't set when a slave is present, it won't boot. Also make sure the ribbon cable is connected the right way round. I have seen some cheaper ones that don't have the locating lug on one side and can be connected either way round. Make sure the red stripe is next to the power connector on the hard drives and on pin 1 of the motherboard connector.

[DB83]

One other thought.

Some drives do not like co-existing with others.

I would try one at a time - set each to Master - and see if the system boots.

There is also a temptation to leave the jumpers at 'Cable Select' which should mean that drive on the top connector of the cable is the Master and the lower drive the Slave. Does not always work. Specific jumper settings for Master and Slave are always better.

[mysts]

At last this saga ends.
After an hour break with a burger and coke we figured it out.
It was the power cable. Both harddrives connected to the same cable.
Thanks for all of your suggestions.

[jimmalenko]

Really ?

That would have been the last thing I would have tried. All's well that ends well !

[gll99]

The now unused connector could have a faulty pin or it wasn't properly pushed in. I've built many systems for friends and family using multiple smaller hdd and most share connectors with no issues.

Many new ps have only 3 ide hdd/rom power connectors so sharing is a must unless you limit yourself to 3 devices or use sata drives. Even then if you follow the wires you will see that at least 2 are jumped together on the same feed.

Barring human error and if the connectors themselves are fine then I would expect a future ps or hdd issue.