2nd HDD causes crash

When I try and attach a slave HDD the system "Blue Screens" and says that there is a hardware conflict. I have both HDD's shorted correctly to "Master and Slave" and both are on correct cable connections. If I remove the Slave drive and redo the shorting block on Master HDD to correct position, system boots normaly......can boot the system with both drives in "Safe Mode ", but fails in normal mode. I have tried different drives as "Slave" and get same results. I am running WinXP, fully updated, this problem just started also.

 

Hi,
Seems strange, at first I had few suggestions I could make, thinking about it, I found a few.

Start at the basic hardware.
Swap data cables.
Some ribbon cables can be connected "upside down ", so check that the red marked side is pin #1 on both the motherboard and the drive. (Is it an 80 lead cable?)
You are changing the jumper setting on the main HDD. I take it there is a "single drive/master" setting or a "master with slave setting ". Double check the jumper setting (it is not hard to be looking at the jumpers the wrong way up).
I wonder if the main HDD has been partitioned with another HDD as a "logical/extended" partition of the "primary" partition. The new slave HDDs will not work as an extended partition. You could run the HDD manufacturer's utilities, which may tell you.

You can boot into safe mode. Look in Device Manager. See if there are any problems listed.
Run Error Checking (chkdsk) from normal mode with the main HDD and from safe mode with the slave drive connected.

Can't think of many more at the moment
Matt
Another:
Is the power supply capable of handling the extra load? A power calculator:
http://www.journeysystems.com/power_supply_calculator.php

 

Thanks for ideas, well give the last one the main check as I am sure that the cable is good and that the shorting blocks are right, but never thought about the hard drive. The hard drive in question is a dual boot hard drive with xp and linux. Ran test with another 2K drive and it last night all worked okay either with the xp or the 2k as master, so I think that you thought about how slave drive is partitioned makes sense to look into, thanks....

 

Just so I am not confusing you (not hard for me ).

It will not so much be the way the slave drives are partitioned, but the way the master drive is partitioned.

Here is basic information about partitioning:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/struct_Partitions.htm

You can partition a slave HDD as a logical/extented partition of the master HDD. If you then take that slave drive away and replace it with another, the partitioning information on the master HDD will then be wrong.

I have recently been looking at the Seagate utility Diskwizard. It has an option "update the MBR ", this is what could be used to correct the partitioning information. It may also be quite risky, although the utility has an option "backup the MBR" so you could revert to a backup, if necessary (see if you can make a backup of the MBR, it may come in handy in the future).

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Something else I have just thought of. The main HDD may have a Dynamic Drive Overlay installed. This causes all sorts of problems when you start changing the configuration of the HDDs in the system.

Matt

 

Thanks for info, will look more into it