added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

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added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

October 22, 2004, 04:52:30 PM

I added an old hd I had lying around today onto my hp pavilion 6835. The original hard drive was jumpered for " cable select", but I changed it to "master/single" and then I jumpered the slave drive to the slave position. After I installed it, I booted up the system and entered the bios, manually entered the parameters of the slave drive, and properly designated which drive was master and which drive was slave. after that I saved the changes and exited bios. The system loaded Windows ME just fine (noticeably slower than before though). I checked the "my computer" folder and saw that my new drive was recognized. I clicked on it and was able to enter the folder.

Now, my problem is, every time I shutdown the computer, the next time I turn it on, the bios disables my slave drive, so that I have to once again enter bios and manually turn it back on (the setting for the slave drive are saved though). I tried restarting before shutting down, and on the restart the computer still recognized the new drive, but once again on shutdown, the computer disabled my new slave drive. Any ideas or things that I forgot to update/change in order to get my new drive to work?

Thanks

Joe

Re: added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

Reply #1 – October 22, 2004, 05:20:51 PM

there is a couple of things you can do. ther are a couple of situations that could cause this.
1 Your system configuration changes because your system battery is dead.So it just loads up default drivers
2 your jumper switch to clear system memory is in the clear position.
3 possibly some bios virus(probably not though)

There are also a couple of ways to fix this. One would be to just transfer all of your files to the new hard drive, and pull the old one out. Another would be to replace the battery, and another would be to change out you bios chip. I wouldnt replace the bios chip unless i had to.
Also make sure that you check the jumper on the mother board is on the right setting. It will be as close as possible to the battery. there are only two positons, but i would make sure that you save this for last, It could make it so that you will have to load up all of your new drivers. also the battery is like a giant watch battery.

Re: added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

Reply #2 – October 22, 2004, 05:44:17 PM

Well, my mb is an ASUS-cuw-am. It does not have jumpers. All settings are controlled through bios, so I don't have to worry about the jumpers. :) The battery might be a good idea though. I bought the computer in Aug. 2001, and it orginally was a display model, which might have been on the shelves as far back as late 2000/early 2001, so the battery just might be dead now. But, if the battery were dead, would my clock settings still work? the computer clock still keeps time (although it does creep ahead, right now its 4 minutes fast, and I just reset it a month ago).

As for bios virus, I say "nay", but I do have another idea: what about updating my bios? I know that there a couple updated versions of the bios programm available from hp online for my computer, but I've never felt the need to update the bios b/c it used to work just fine.

Any other ideas?

Re: added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

Reply #3 – October 22, 2004, 06:09:18 PM

Quote from: joefriday

Well, my mb is an ASUS-cuw-am. It does not have jumpers. All settings are controlled through bios, so I don't have to worry about the jumpers. :)

It should still have a jumper to clear cmos

Re: added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

Reply #4 – October 22, 2004, 09:31:58 PM

Have you tried setting both drives to cable select? How about putting the old HD on the secondary chanel, have you tried that? Could be the CMOS battery giving you BIOS troubles even though they tend to last 5 years or more. However, if the clock is still running, I doubt it is the battery. Cheap insurance to change it though. Just put in the new one quickly after pulling the old one.

Flashing to a new BIOS may or may not fix the problem. Usually does not hurt to though. Just make absolutly sure you do not loose power to the PC during the flash process!

Re: added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

Reply #5 – October 23, 2004, 07:02:17 AM

Are you using a special "cable select" data cable?
These have wire #28 cut (possibly a long chunk, or maybe just a tiny punch-out) to make the connector after the cut the permanant slave position.

Re: added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

Reply #6 – October 23, 2004, 02:07:18 PM

I did not use cable select, mainly because I don't have the special data cable. I instead used the master/slave settings and used an ancient 40 pin IDE cable that had the two connectors for the drives. I think not using the cable select feature is probably the main culprit. Oh well, I decided to give up on it. My current hd has 30 gb, and I'm only using 5 gb right now. I just had an ancient hard drive out of a 386 that I wanted to put to use. definately not worth all the hassle. :p Thanks anyways guys.

Re: added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

Reply #7 – October 25, 2004, 05:31:12 PM

Quote

The original hard drive was jumpered for " cable select", but I changed it to "master/single"

I know this is probably too late, but the "master/single" setting means that the drive is by itself. If you ever decide to install a slave drive in the future you may want to check and see if there is a jumper settings for "master w/slave present" or something similar.

Re: added second hard drive, have problem, need help.

Reply #8 – November 07, 2004, 02:56:53 PM

Problem fixed! I just ended up hooking it to the secondary EIDE cable (an 80-conductor cable select cable). The only problem I had was that the ancient HD did not have the cable select jumper option. My solution: I jumpered it for a slave drive position, then put it on the slave position on the cable select cable. Left the CD burner on cable select, and fired the computer back up. Works great. No conflicts, and system performance did not suffer at all. Very happy :)

Joe