Problems with 2nd HDD

[beard24]

hi, i had a similar problem to this user: http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread70304.html

I had installed a MAxtor 'DiamondMax 10' 160GB HDD as a slave to another 120GB HDD set as the Master running Windows XP Pro with SP2 and 1GB of Ram.

I have all the IDE cables and jumpers set correctly but when i start up the system,it detects both HDs on the screen where it looks for the Primary+Secondary Masters+Slaves. But when it gets onto the next screen where the system looks for boot records (floppy/CD/IDE) it detects the primary hard drive, tries to find the slave drive for about 30secs, fails to do so and moves on to tell me i have a 'primary HDD error, press F1 to continue". I hit F1 and it loads XP normally

However, once in XP i cant find the drive in My Computer (only the master/system drive). The user in the thread (linked above) said they could find it in device manager under disk drives and other threads i have seen suggest finding it in Control Panel >> Administrative Tools>>Computer Management>>Disk Management, and formatting if necessary. Sadly it doesnt show up in either of these places.

Its as if the system recognises it to begin with on bootup but then doesnt bother from there on. In XP its as if there isn;t a 2nd drive at all, just my system drive and the 2 CD/DVD drives.

Perhaps i need to format the Maxtor but i dont know how to acheive this when the system cant locate it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated cos Im really stumped by this and im about ready to throw a hammer at it:twisted:

[jbennet]

the new drive requires partitioning and formatting

in xp go control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management

Select disk management under the storage section on the left

[beard24]

yeah tried that already but its only showing my primary master (system HDD) and secondary master (DVD drive), and no primary slave HDD.
Nothing i seem to do makes this MAxtor (slave HDD) show up anywhere.

Also to correct something in my original post: The error message i get when the system fails to recognise the Maxtor in the latter of the initial startup screens (before you get the the Windows XP loading screen) reads as follows

"Primary SLAVE HDD error, press F1 to continue",

-not "Primary HDD error..." as previously stated. dunno if that makes things any clearer to anyone out there

[beard24]

Just tried having a look in the bios as well, now it gives me the error message (as described above) when booting up, then when i get into BIOS, the MAxtor is listed in the IDE Devices section but nowhere else. I looked to see if i could include it in the boot process to see if that would make a difference but it was not listed as an option

[jbennet]

Check that your master drive is actually set to master and not cable select