slave drive

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I just installed a slave drive on a Win98 computer. The BIOS setup recognizes everything correctly:

IDE Controller: Both
Hard Disk Pre-Delay: Disabled
Primary IDE Master: original hard drive
Primary IDE Slave: new hard drive
Secondary IDE Master: CD-RW

However, upon boot-up the slave drive is not recognized in windows explorer. The original hard drive is C: and the CD-RW is D:. No other drives listed.
Under control panel, add hardware plug-n-play doesn

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The original hard drive is C:

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[/indent]Do you mean that the 8 Gig drive is being seen as the C drive ?? If it is, then you need to change the jumper on the back of the old drive to reflect it’s new role as a slave. If it’s not, check the properties of the C drive to determine if Windows 98 is “seeing” all 50+ GB of the new drive. There are size restrictions in ScanDisk and also in the BIOS.

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It is seeing the original 60GB drive as the master (and the computer is seeing all 60GB). BIOS is seeing and identifying both hard drives correctly. Since I’m adding only 8 GB (hard drive from older computer)., should I be bumping up against the 137GB limit?

It appears that it is a Win98 problem(?). I have also made sure that all Win98 updates have been installed.

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Are you certain the jumpers on the drive are set correctly ?? Take a look here for some of the manufacturer’s settings. I’ve attached a screenshot of the jumpers on the back of a drive. Some are labeled like the one in this example.

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And, in addition to Doc’s nice picture, if you search The Lounge you’ll find this topic discussed in the past. One of the examples I always point out to folks is drives like Western Digital who (used to?) have a jumper setting for a lone drive (master single) and a setting for master in a dual drive arrangement. If you don’t get it right, one of the drives would be inoperable. (Doc’s picture looks like an IBM which is also a tad confusing for some people)

Edited later: I looked up a recent thread on the topic in which I pointed a Lounger to this Western Digital Example.

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Thank you for the replies. I had downloaded the spec sheet for the slave drive and the jumper settings in the spec sheet agreed with those stuck to the drive. It I have the jumpers set for either “slave” or “cable select”, both drives are seen in the BIOS setup, but not in Win98. If I set the jumper to something else, I get odd results in BIOS and Win98 as the slave is sometimes seen as the master, etc.

If the drives are identified correctly in BIOS setup (i.e. make and model number), would that not be confirmation that the jumpers are set correctly?
thanks.

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If you had the 60 GB drive jumpered as cable select (they often come from the factory setup that way) and the smaller drive jumpered as a slave then the BIOS would likely “see” both drives while the OS would “see” only the cable select jumpered drive.
You can’t mix drive jumper settings, as the Western Digital link in Al’s post points out.

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OK, lessee if I have everything correct. Your Windows drive (C: ?) is a 60 gig drive and the used drive, which should come out as D: is an 8 gig. Have I got that right? Please tell us what brand each of the drives is. Are you sure that you have the jumpers on the 60 gig correctly set to master, as you’ve already confirmed that you have the used 8 gig jumpered as slave? BTW, I would stay away from cable select for now at least. The next test might be – boot to a DOS (Win98) boot floppy and get to an A: prompt. Then do a DIR C: /P and a DIR D: /P command to see if you can, first of all get a directory listing of the drives and if you can recognize some or all of the file and directory names on each one. (those commands are not case sensitive. If you get any errors doing a directory command, it’s likely that either you don’t have the drive jumpered correctly or it has suddenly decided to go belly-up. Come on back.

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Thanks. Buried with work at the moment, so it may be next week before I get time to fuss with it again.

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Make sure that you have jumpered both drives correctly, either as Master & Slave, or as both Cable Select. Personally, I don’t trust Cable Select, so I always set the drives to Master & Slave. Once you boot into Windows, should you still not see the Slave drive, you might want to change the drive letter of your CD-ROM from D: to something else (say, drive R:). Reboot the computer after changing the drive letter. If you have set your bios settings *under Plug N’ Play Operating System* to Yes, Windows should assign the next available drive letter — now D: — to the Slave Drive. Your CD-ROM should show up as drive R:, eliminating any conflict. If it still isn’t seen, check your power supply leads to the slave drive — switch them. You may have a dead lead.

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