Installation of Slave Drive Problem

I am installing two maxtor/Quantum drives in a Compaq pc. One drive is the original drive and the slave is from another compaq. I set the jumper settings on both drives. The problem lies with the computer actually picking up the slave drive. Compaq diagnostics sees the hard drive and shows it test out okay but the computer still won't see the drive. What am I doing wrong? Thanks for any help.

 

Do you have them set as Master and Slave or Cable Select? Cable Select will only work if you have the right cable and the drives are plugged into the right places.

How do you have things configured? HDD/HDD, CDRom/CDR or HDD/CDRom, HDD etc. etc. Too many ways to set up, depending on what's in your machine to list all the possibilities.

Go into the BIOS and see if BIOS will autodetect both drives. If not, try entering all the information manually. Everything you need should be printed on the hard drive.

 

I have set both jumpers on each drive to be master or slave. I have gone to control panal/Add New Hardware and did an autodetect. It finds nothing. Then I did a detect on non plug and play hardware and nothing gets detected there either. I haven't really worked with 98. How can I get directly into the computer settings so I can change the BIOS. I went from 95 to NT workstation then to 2000. Thanks for the help.

 

I don't remember which way you get in with a Compaq but if you hit the esc. key when the Compaq splash screen first comes up the splash screen will go away and either in the lower left side or the upper right side it will tell you which key to hit to enter setup.

Before you do that, try booting up to a boot disk and see if the drive is recognized in DOS. If it is then there is no need to go into BIOS. Just run fdisk from the boot disk and remove all partitions from the second drive. Reboot to the boot disk and run fdisk again to create a logical or extended partition. Since they both had been used in working computers then they both probably have primary partitions and the one you want to use as a slave drive will have to have the primary partition removed and a logical or extended partition used instead. I just read (on this BBS) that Windows 98 won't recognize a second primary partition.

Once the partitions are set the way you want just format the drive and you'll be ready to go. Just be careful as to which drive you remove the primary partition from because once the partition is removed you will have lost everything on that drive and it will have to be formatted to be of any use.