PC Help Problems adding a second Hard Drive

[janissary]

I recently decided trying to upgrade my old HP a bit and add a second hard drive. I bought a Seagate 40 GB drive kit from Wal-Mart. Though a nice reliable pc my Hp is not to great for upgrading and has only one extra bay to put the new hard drive in. Unfortunately this bay is located too far away from the original drive to put them on the same IDE cable as master and slave. The extra bay is directly below my CD-Rom drive. I hooked the new drive up to the same IDE cable as the CD-rom with the hard drive as master and the cd-rom as the slave. My bios picked up the new drive but windows98 would not show either the new drive or the cd-rom. I called the tech support line and the guy had me take out the drive and attach it to the IDE for the original drive as a slave. Of course since there are no brackets nearby I had to set the new drive up on a couple of books along side my case free computer. We got the drive working and formatted but there is no way I can use it very long like that. He suggested I use it for a bit and reboot a couple of times before trying to put it into the configuration I need for my computer. So this evening I decided to try to put the drive in the extra bay. I changed the jumpers on the drive and the cd-rom to master and slave and even changed the IDE cable to the new one that was included in the kit. When I rebooted my computer I was amazed that the new drive actually was available and seems to work just great. Unfortunately now I can't access my cd-rom drive. It shows up in the bios but its not in accessible in windows98. This is the first time I've tried installing new hardware on a computer and its got me really scratching my head!

 

[fgarvb1]

Huh...well, if you can't find a longer IDE cable somewhere I guess you might splice some more into your old one with some solder and heat shrink tubing.

I worry about performance if you do that..

 

[ReadyOne]

Check the jumper settings for slave/master/cable select. Make the HD master, CD slave.

It is good to run each hard drive on a different cable. Much better performance when doing drive to drive operations (copying files). Put the swap file on the most active partition of the least used drive.

You can get a longer cable at almost any computer store. (I think I even saw one at Best Buy.) We sell them for $2.

BTW, you can't solder one up. I keep a roll of ribbon cable and supply of IDC connectors and make up custom ones when needed for large cases. I use a small vice to press the connector on.

 

[Weird Harold]

I recently decided trying to upgrade my old HP a bit and add a second hard drive. I bought a Seagate 40 GB drive kit from Wal-Mart. Though a nice reliable pc my Hp is not to great for upgrading and has only one extra bay to put the new hard drive in.

Would the cable reach if you replaced the floppy drive with the new HD?

Another possibility is to see if the HD ribbon cable can be reversed -- i.e. reach from the MB to the first drive with the short section that normall goes betwen the drives an use the long section to connect the second drive.

Note, it doesn't matter which connector goes to the slave and which to the master for IDE drives like it does with older hard drives and floppies that have twisted section in the cable.

If none of those options work, go (or call around) to a computer repair shop and ask if they can make you a custom HD cable that will reach between the drives, or check HP's website to see if they sell one to fit.

Win 98 has a problem recognising components when there is a gap in the "normal sequence" or when there are removable and non-removable drives on the same IDE controller. You have both situations for Win98 to deal with, so your best option is to get both drives on the sme IDE controller so that there ar no gaps in the drive sequence and all of the non-removable drives are a different controller from the removable media drive (CD Drive)

Mosty HP's don't have the third IDE controller that systems with a separate Sound Card have, so moving the CD drive to the sound crd's controller probably isn't an option -- if you do have a separate sound card, you might try using that controller for the CD.

 

[janissary]

Thanks for the reply ReadyOne. I thought about getting a custom made cable but that would only be necessary if I have to put both drives on the same IDE. From the looks of it, HP intended any additional drives to be on the secondary IDE because thats the only way you can physically do it without getting a different sized cable. I've got the second hard drive on the secondary IDE cable. I've double checked the jumpers and the new hard drive is set as the master and the cd-rom is set as the slave. For some reason though my cd-rom no longers shows up in "my computer" or the device manager.

I also noticed that under the "Performance" tab in the systems properties it says "D drive is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system." The help file says: "if you only see the message Drive X is using an MS-DOS compatibility mode file system on one drive, that drive is using an MS-DOS compatibility (real-mode) driver, which may reduce that drive’s performance. Contact your hardware manufacturer to see if an updated driver is available for your drive. If not, the drive’s performance may be less than optimal, but you can still use it." Okay thats real informative, but what about my cd-rom! Also in device manager there is a yellow exclamation point on the secondary IDE controller.

Searching the net this morning I ran across an article that said on the secondary IDE you should set your cd-rom as the master and second drive as the slave. This configuration would actually be closer to how the computer was orginally set up. Before I started messing around with stuff the cd-rom was set on cable select and plugged in to the master end of the cable. The slave end was tucked neatly into the extra drive bay just under the cd-rom bay. This is the set-up I orginally tried but the computer would not see the drive. I think that had more to do with me not following the directions and leaving in the old cable instead of changing to the new one included in the kit. I really don't know but I'll probably try changing it around this weekend just to see what happens.

Though this is starting to get a bit aggrevating, its actually pretty interesting and one way or another I'm actually learning some stuff.

 

[janissary]

Thanks for the advice Weird Harold, guess I'll have to look into that customized cable.

 

[ReadyOne]

How old is this system?

First, the yellow exclamation point on the secondary IDE controller needs to be dealt with. If you don't have a working secondard IDE then how can you plug anything into it?

Second, if "D" is the master on the secondary, pull the CD and see what happens. If the IDE problem goes away, then it's possible the CD is very old (I doubt it) or you have a cableing/jumper problem. The stripe on the cable goes towards the power connector.

You can also put a real mode CD driver in your config.sys (OAKCDROM.SYS) and MSCDEX in your AUTOEXEC.BAT if you are still forced to real mode on "D". If Windows is running that IDE channel in real mode, then you won't see the CD because windoes doesn't have any real mode drivers for CDs.

BTW, does you new hard drive need an 80 wire cable? If you're not using one, then I'll bet everything clears up when you do...

You can try either CD or HD as master; in theory it doesn't matter, but for some older CDs it does matter. From the Win98 point of view, moving the HD up to master makes it higher on the list which can help when windows goes looking for hard drives.

Check that you have IRQ 14 & 15 available. In BIOS, select "OS is NOT plug & pray". BIOS can generally lay things out just fine, and telling windows not to change things can help keep Windows from screwing up redoing what BIOS has already done.

 

[janissary]

I bought the computer in early 99 and I'm pretty sure it was built in 98, so the cd is kinda old. The secondary IDE does work, the new hard drive on it seems to be working just fine; except for it being in ms-dos compatibility mode. I think this weekend I'll try unplugging the cd, just to see what happens. I've found several microsoft articles about why a hard drive may be put into ms-dos compatibility mode in windows98. I guess I'll be spending at least part of my weekend reading through it all. This is just a guess but I think there must be some sort of conflict between my new hard drive and the cd-rom. I guess the old cd-rom doesn't like sharing the secondary IDE. I say this because when I hooked the new hard drive up on the primary IDE as the slave everything worked fine, including the cd-rom. But like I said earlier, those great minds at HP didn't design my system to have two hard drives on the primary IDE because there is just no way I can stretch that ribbon from the mother board, across to the opposite side attach it to the old hard drive and then stretch it even further up and around to the only open bay where my new hard drive sits. In case your not familar with old Hp pavilions, the hard drive is vertically mounted at the front of the case with its interface on the opposite side from the motherboard. I really like this old Hp but it definetly was not meant to be upgraded very much, at least not by inexperienced folk like myself.

 

[ReadyOne]

Are you using an 80 wire cable that came with the new drive, or the old 40 wire cable that came from HP?