Odd HDD letter change up.

I am using Windows 95b (4.00.950b) on a Pentium 2 MMX @266mhz with 256 MB RAM, dual channel IDE controller, IE5 (5.00.3314.2101), Generic NEC floppy disk, Maxtor 6E030L0 HDD (20 GB), WD Caviar HDD model AC28400 (8.4 GB), a Toshiba XM6102B ATAPI CD-ROM, and a Hewlett Packard CD Writer +9500.

I used fdisk on the WD drive (it had been in use but I wanted to do a clean install on it). I had intended to copy the 95 installation CD to a folder on this drive and install the system from there because I had been having trouble accessing my CD-ROM.

I formatted the WD and used a startup disk to execute a:\sys C:\.

I put the WD in as slave with the Maxtor as master. When I powered up, the WD showed up as C: (it booted) and the Maxtor was shown as D: (it does this when connected to either ribbon cable receptical).
At this point I was nervous about copying anything and aborted my plan.

Questions:
1. Do you know why the WD was seen as C: and booted, instead of the Maxtor?

2. Could it have anything to do with the ribbon cable being 80 conductor instead of 40? (The 80 conductor cable came with, and is required by, one of the Maxtor drives I have.)

3. Is there a way to get the WD to access the CD-ROM before I have installed the OS? (Don't know if this will help though since I had been having trouble with the CD-ROM already.)

Thank you for any help you may be able to give. Ed B

 

The difference between and 80 wire and 40 wire ribbon besides the amount of wires, is the location of the Master position and Slave position.
The 80 wire ribbon has the Master on the end, the Slave in the middle.
The 40 wire ribbon has the Master in the middle, the Slave on the end.
So much for consistency, and may be what you are bumping against.
I would change the jumper on the drives from CS [cable select] and set to the appropiate setting you want the drive to be, and connect to the proper ribbon position.
In my experience, the CS position doesn't always work as it should.

 

Thanks markp62.

I have solved the problem by changing some settings in the BIOS and switching the jumpers.

BTW, based on some searching I did since posting, I think that the extra wires in the 80 wire ribbon are to prevent cross channel interference when using higher data transfer rates. I think they are at ground potential and are paired with a data carrier (every other wire is for data) but I may be wrong about that.

At any rate, I have the problem corrected and your post helped by making me look once more at what I had done.

Happy New Year to you!

Ed B

 

Thanks for posting back the results!