hard drive problem?

Question

My old hard drive is 80gigs.but i am trying to add a new 40gig drive to my system which is a dell,when added the system fails to booth i receive 2beeps on post and then a message saying cannot locate master/slave drive.i removed my old hard drive and tried booting with the new drive alone but i have the same problem the jumpers are set correctly on the but its still not working,my 768 memory's are seated correctly nothing is wrong with the motherboard or the cpu chip the only problem is that my system is not recognizing my new drive, however i was able to booth with both hard drives at on point but i removed it to test it and to see if there was still a problem and low and behold there was i am currently using my old hard drive but i need some information which is stored on my new drive can u plz give some advice no how to master/slave both drives so that they work .note both my dvd and my cd drives are working fine.

Answer 1

If your sure you have the jumpers right, check the cable your using. Some cables/motherboards support something called I think) Master Cord Selection where one plug on it is always the master (No matter what jumper you have) and the other plug is always t he slave (no matter what jumper). So try switching the plugs the hard drives are plugged into. If that didn't make sence, drop me a message and I can explain it better.

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Answer 2

I would put both hard drives in CS mode, thats cable select mode. Make your old hard drive plug into the connector at the end of the cable, and the new hard drive plug into the connector at the middle of the cable. Also make sure your power plugs are plugged into the hard drives as well. When you use hard drives that are different brands, the master/slave setting almost always fails, only other option is cable select.

Answer 3

I assume you went into the CMOS setup and enabled the primary slave?