Help adding a new HDD

Everything else
1

ok, i assumed that this would be an easy addtion to my existing PC…but obviously i am even less smart than i thought. :oops:

i want to add the HDD i took out of my new Series 2 TiVo to my existing PC, which is running Win98SE and has Partion Magic installed.

i opened up the case and as i remembered when i built this PC, i have the current HDD jumpered as ‘cable select’ and it is using the ‘zero’ connection on the IDE cable.

i jumpered the new HDD as ‘cable select’ and hooked it up via the ‘one’ cable connection.

when the PC posts, i do not see the new HDD being recognized, i.e. - i see “PRIMARY: QUANTUM FIREBALL”, but i do not see the new HDD which is a Western Digital. hmmmm.

the new HDD connected via the ‘zero’ connector will spin up but it is still not accounted for in the posting; i get the message “PRIMARY: NONE”, which leads me to assume that i have done something wrong.

silly question prolly: do all mother boards support cable select?

lastly, i have tried hooking the new HDD up in about all configurations possible and still don’t see it during the post. any ideas what i have done wrong?

many thanks in advance!

2

Did you go into the BIOS and tell it there is another drive now?

3

Have you tried all variants of master/slave? How about hooking up just the TIVO drive by itself? Did you go into the bios and change the detection settings?

4

umm, no. i have to do that? errr… :oops:

wouldn’t the drive at least post prior to needing to enter the BIOS?

no, i did try all the variations of slave/primary though.

5

If the second IDE channel is set to “no hard drive”, it wouldn’t.

6

thanks 'Tanker and Jason. you both may use the remainder of this thread to make fun of me. :oops: :oops:

yes, the BIOS wasn’t set to detect the new drive…flipped it to Auto-detect and boing all is well.

arrgh - i wish i wasn’t such a hardware newbie.

many thanks for the time and answers!

7

No, no - if I know the answer to a hardware question, it is usually because I have made the same mistake and torn out a bunch of hair trying to figure it out. :wink:

8

And look at me over in the networking thread. Computers ain’t easy, but the solutions are usually easy enough to make you feel stupid as hell. :?

9

Man, ain’t that the truth. I could tell some stories about all my hardware flubs and failures. The worst thing is having a problem, knowing you had it before, then forgeting what the heck the solution was.

10

It’s strange that the BIOS didn’t have Auto-detect as default. It would be a better default than “none” I think. I don’t remember what mine was, but I think I changed it from auto to none myself.

11

i prolly switched mine. i built this machine back in 2000…so it is time to build another one and i am trying to find a good deal on a prebuilt system…nothing quite as tedious as spending 2 days building up a PC, IMHO.

now some of you are going to say you love building up hardware, but here is a small example of why i don’t (and it is part bad luck and part ignorance…what i keep telling myself)

so after sage advice to check the BIOS, the new HDD was recognized and ready to be FAT32’d. since the old HDD on this machine is only 20GB, i had partioned it into 3 partions: 10GB, 5GB, and 5GB. the last 5GB was used for a small amount of time when i was working from home, so it used to have Win2K on it.

having Partion Magic installed, i ran it and told it to merge the 10GB and the first 5GB together. took about an hour and then was all good. system rebooted and everything looked fine.

i then told it to do the same with the last 5GB. took about 2 hours. when it rebooted for the final time, the machine came up, threw all sorts of errors, the worst of which was something to do with my BIOS being out of date. both the DVD and CDR drive were not posting, even when using the Win98SE boot disk. no USB support, so no mouse support. it was hosed.

so i spent about 5 hours fix this. how? well, after spending about 2 hours trying to get around the problem, i eventually had to wipe the partion and start fresh. ugh.

needless to say, i am sure this is somehow my fault for something i didn’t understand in merging an old partion which had Win2K installed with the main partion running Win98…so maybe in the future i will just stay away from hardware chores.

the only positive: my machine is noticable faster and of course, the new 40GB HDD from my TiVo is installed and in working order.

:oops: :arrow: 8)