Im having trouble with a coworkers pc at work. He had an old pc that was pieced together. The power supply finally died. He was given another office computer to use that is also kinda old. I opened it to pop in his old hd as the slave so that he can access his stuff. After doing this the computer wouldnt fire up at all. The system setup at boot screen does not recognize a master or slave drive. I removed the hd and set the pc back how it was....still wont fire up at all. Any ideas? Both hds are IDE.

 

Did you set the jumpers properly on the HDDs?

When you say fire up at all, the machine won't even turn on to bios? If so, check the wall plugs and power cable.

 

Came home today itching to watch porn, but my PS died while I was gone. My laptop has nothing on it :/

 

I mean it won't get past the windows loading screen. It fires up and the drives spin, but windows can't load because it doesn't recognize the drives.

I left the jumper the way it was on the hd that was in the current machine, and set the old jumper to slave. The hd on the current machine does not have labels for position, and only has 4 positions. Old HD has 5 positions.

 

So it reads the master at least.

the 8 pin one: http://www.chotocheeta.com/wp-conten...ive-jumper.gif
the 10 pin one: http://www.studynotes.net/images/wd-jumpers.gif

I'd just set them both to cable select.

 

check the bios, I've seen a few with odd settings. sometimes older drives play funny because they don't follow all the rules, and in turn some bios's act funny because they tried to work around that

 

Nah, if the windows load screen comes up, it knows where to boot to.

I would guess the master in the "new" computer is fucked up.

Format and reinstall the OS.

 

Sorry. It never gets to the windows screwn. Just the bios screen. Then it says primary drive not found. Secondary drive not found. Cover was previously open. Strike F1 to reboot F2 to enter setup. In the setup menu under drive configuration it lists "unknown device" for primary master and secondary master.

The computer worked with the drive that it came with as far as i know. I installed the new drive set to master and removed the original one and got the same error.

 

Get a bridge and pull the data off the old drive. Then reformat.

IE. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-014-_-Product

 

Ok. Got the drive I swapped in to work, but not the original one. However, there are no drivers for the hardware now and the ethernet, etc cards don't work. I'm going to use one of my ide to USB converter cables to try and see if I can pull anything off of that drive in terms of drivers and such.