PC Peripherals Connecting 2 hdds

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Brendon

Brendon

Galvanizer
I bought a new cabinet for my dad and I reconnected all the components. However now his hdds work only one at a time.

If I connect both together then it gives me boot disk failure. I changed the IDE cable, but to no avail.

If only one hdd is connected, it works absolutely fine.

The cabinet has a 350 W Umax PSU with 25A, 35A , 15A on the 3.3V, 5V, 12V rails and the voltages are all within 4%(+ve) when only one hdd is connected. Please help!
 
Are they PATA hard disks? If you've connected both to the same ide cable, you need to set one as master and other as slave. You have a jumper behind the hard disk for this.
 
zhopudey said:
Are they PATA hard disks? If you've connected both to the same ide cable, you need to set one as master and other as slave. You have a jumper behind the hard disk for this.
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Yeah they are PATA hard disks. Will try changing the jumper settings and post back.

And thanks for both ur replies
 
Ok wierd thing happened. I managed to get both drives (40 Gb and 80 Gb) to work together by putting both on cable select.( 80 gb master and 40 gb slave)

However when I reverse the drives the 80 Gb drive doesnt detect and the 40 Gb drive remains as slave. Even if I set the jumpers to master and slave the 40 Gb drive remains a slave and the other doesnt get detected.

What could possibly be wrong ?
 
BF1983 said:
Ok wierd thing happened. I managed to get both drives (40 Gb and 80 Gb) to work together by putting both on cable select.( 80 gb master and 40 gb slave)

However when I reverse the drives the 80 Gb drive doesnt detect and the 40 Gb drive remains as slave. Even if I set the jumpers to master and slave the 40 Gb drive remains a slave and the other doesnt get detected.

What could possibly be wrong ?
Click to expand...

Are you using a 80 wire ATA 100 cable ?

It is recommended that the Master drive should be at the end of the IDE cable and slave in the Middle. Just changing master slave jumpers "may" not be enough you may also have to move the connector at the end of the IDE cable to the Master drive each time.

Are both drives options set correctly in the BIOS ? And are both drives formatted ?

Just as an experiment jumper both dives as masters and connect them using both the Primary and Secondary channels cables (disconnect any optical drives temporarily)- do both drives work fine when you do this ?
 
Nope that still did not work. I gave up and connected the 80 GB drive as secondary master and connected the cd rom as primary slave.

Anyways thanks to all who replied. :hap2:
 
When you have 2 hdds and 1 optical, it is advisible to connect one hdd as primary master, and the other on secondary wth the optical drive.
 
zhopudey said:
When you have 2 hdds and 1 optical, it is advisible to connect one hdd as primary master, and the other on secondary wth the optical drive.
Click to expand...

No. Better to Master-Slave the 2 HDDs on one IDE channel, and leave the optical on the second channel, to prevent data-transfer issues.
 
TechHead said:
No. Better to Master-Slave the 2 HDDs on one IDE channel, and leave the optical on the second channel, to prevent data-transfer issues.
Click to expand...

That may be true, but I didnt have a choice, it just did not work that way for me.
 
zhopudey said:
Really, I thought data transfer between the 2 hdds would be faster if they were on seperate channels.
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yea its better to have them on seperate channels if you transfer data more frequently between the HDD's cos even though it feels that things happen simultaneously , only one device uses a channel at a time , thus reducing transfer speeds if both are on the same channel .
 
TechHead said:
No. Better to Master-Slave the 2 HDDs on one IDE channel, and leave the optical on the second channel, to prevent data-transfer issues.
Click to expand...

i agree, i always follow the same rule, but now even i am confused :no: do guys really think that it is better to have hd+optical for better transfer rate with 2 hd's
 
TechHead said:
No. Better to Master-Slave the 2 HDDs on one IDE channel, and leave the optical on the second channel, to prevent data-transfer issues.
Click to expand...

I am from this school of thought too... and imagine the cabling nightmare for 2 HDD and 2 Opticals (as installed in my system) if you had the setup as one HDD and Optical in each channel. I say this as the HDD would be in a 3.5" bay and the Optical in 5.25" bay - can you now imagine the cabling nightmare - unless you have the HDD in 5.25" bays with cradles in which case they would not be in front of the intake fan - which be the start of another headache - the HDD temperaturtes.
 
I think with the parallel connection, the channel gets shared by the two devices connected to it. Hence in order to get full bandwidth, the hdds should be on different channels. With optical drives it wont matter, as we don't use them continously like hdds.

As for the cable problem, get rounded ide cables, or else just go sata.
 
zhopudey said:
As for the cable problem, get rounded ide cables, or else just go sata.
Click to expand...

I have one Antec Cobra rounded IDE cable - man that is one P.O.S. cable - with HDDs I had data loss and sometimes a booting problem - the moment I changed from that rounded cable to a regular ATA100 cable all problems disappeared !! I tried using the Cobra on my Optical drives but had problems with CD writing at 48x and over. I think SATA is the way to go.
 
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