Setting up a [SATA] slave HD

System info:
Dell Dimension 8400
Pentium 4 cpu 3.00GHz
1.00GB ram
3.5in floppy
16XDVD-ROM
16XDVD+/-RW
160GB SATA Western Digital Caviar HD newly installed
56K PCI Data Fax Modem
MS Windows XP Homs SP2

My problem is trying to set up my original SATA Seagate Barracuda 160GB drive as a slave to my WD drive. I have the WD drive plugged into the NO. 1 SATA pins on the mother board and the Seagate plugged into the NO. 2 pins.
My WD drive works fine. I have changed the settings configuration (F2) and this is what they show:
Drive 0 SATA-0 ON
Controller serial ATA
Port SATA-0
Drive details
Drive ID WDCWD1600JS-55NCB1
Capicity 150GB
BIOS This drive is controled by the system bios
Drive 1 SATA-1 ON
Controller serial ATA
Port SATA-1
Drive unknown
No drive details
Is there a jumper setting on any drive that I need to connect in order to activate the slave drive, or is there something else I should be doing?
Sure would appreciate any info or help.

R. Gale Harter
email address removed by Moderator - for your security against spam

 

You might (and I qualify this because of whats probably already installed on your original Seagate) have a few issues to deal with here. Since you have a Dell factory setup (I assume), you more than likely have three partitions on your Seagate - only one of which is commonly visible. You will have a 16 bit partiton, a FAT32 partition and a NTFS partition. By design (factory OEM) your Seagate is intended to be on the SATA 0 Port. For starters, cable the Seagate back to the SATA 1 header (SATA Port 0) and your WD to the SATA 2 header (SATA Port 1) and report back as to whether both drives are then recognized. (Yes, I know this isn't how you want to set things up but I need to know if both drives are recognized this way - We can go to your next step once this has been determined.)

Note: I'll be lazy here and leave the above intact but another thought just occured. You might want to try this before teh above. Can you re-detect the drive in your BIOS (F2 setup) by highlighting the drive and selecting auto. What about manual? Any other options that might show the drive geometry? Sorry for the ambiguity but Dell's BIOS settings are quite lacking compared to normal motherboards. If no can do - go to the paragraph above and report back.

 

hard drive slave

ROCKSTER2U:
I want to thank you for your input on making suggestions on how to possibly
solve my problem. After working with your ideas I finally came to the realization that my Seagate drive was bad. The reason that I installed a WD SATA drive was that the seagate drive was giving me intermittent problems on start up. It would give me an error saying that no boot track found and no drive 0 available. I could turn the system off and then on again and it would boot OK. It got to the point where it would take 2 or 5 restarts before it would boot OK. When I put the connections for the seagate back to the original positions I got the same error as before except that after about the 10th time it still wouldn't boot up. Thats the clue that made me think the drive was dead.Thanks again.

R. Gale

 

I'm not trying to draw this out and further the pain of a bad hard drive but you might want to try a different cable on that Seagate and if you get drive recognition that way regardless of whether or not it boots then shut down, make sure your WD is disconnected and boot from an XP CD. Go into the recovery console (first R) and run the command FIXBOOT. Then type EXIT and see if you are bootable from the Seagate.

 

slave drive

I'll give it a shot. Can't hurt. Thanks