Rocky Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 A pal's PC has some HD issues so I was going to put ina new HD for him, until I saw the price hike being talked about elsewhere in this forum. So I have an old P-ATA 125Gb HD lying around I thought I would use rather than spend over the score on a new one. I unplugged the existing S-ATA HD, and added my P-ATA HD onto the ribbon that goes to the DVD Drive, restarted and booted from the winXP CD. This copied all the XP files as normal, then it did the reboot prior to starting phase of the actual windows XP installation - except that when it restarted it said there was no boot. I went into setup, and it says there are NO drives HD installed, only the DVD Drive. This is strange because it already copied all the files to the new HD, so how can it now say there is not one installed? The HD has jumpers on it, so I have tried a few permutations but it is still not being recognised in the startup. Any ideas why the HD won't finish the WinXP install? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tinker Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 I had a similar issue on my old PC. Turned out that the 40 pin ribbon needed swapping to a 80 pin version. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky Posted October 27, 2011 Author Share Posted October 27, 2011 I have some other ribbons, I'll try that thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buehgler_AS Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 Best to run the HDD as the ATA master and the DVD as the slave. This presumes you have jumpers to set that on both drives, if not, then you may want to set the jumpers for CS (cable select) and try swapping which connector they are plugged into on the ATA cable. You should also confirm/adjust the BIOS configuration for the P-ATA controller to be sure it is running in an appropriate mode for the HDD (sorry, but I do not remember what the good choices are off the top of my head). Then lastly, I'd confirm the boot order settings in the BIOS. Good luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky Posted October 28, 2011 Author Share Posted October 28, 2011 On a ribbon cable. there is obliviously a connector at either end, and about 1/4 of the way from one end, a third connector. Are all connectors equal, or is one deemed a slave, and that is what Cable Select means? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buehgler_AS Posted October 28, 2011 Share Posted October 28, 2011 (edited) Rocky, it depends how old the cable is. On "old" cables all connectors were equal, but everyone had to configure maser and slave settings on devices, then they got "smart" and made the two connectors that are close together slightly different and rewired the cable so the device decided to be master or slave based on which connector a device was plugged into -- that's "cable select". normally the device at the far end of the cable will be the slave, and the one in the middle will be the master. You can find a reasonable summary of all the details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA If these are all reasonably modern bits (e.g. post 2000) you should be able to set the jumpers for "cable select" and plug the two devices into the the two connectors that are closer together and have the hardware configured to function. After that it should just be BIOS settings to get everything properly recognized/initialized. Edited October 28, 2011 by Buehgler_AS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky Posted October 28, 2011 Author Share Posted October 28, 2011 Rocky, it depends how old the cable is. On "old" cables all connectors were equal, but everyone had to configure maser and slave settings on devices, then they got "smart" and made the two connectors that are close together slightly different and rewired the cable so the device decided to be master or slave based on which connector a device was plugged into -- that's "cable select". normally the device at the far end of the cable will be the slave, and the one in the middle will be the master. You can find a reasonable summary of all the details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA If these are all reasonably modern bits (e.g. post 2000) you should be able to set the jumpers for "cable select" and plug the two devices into the the two connectors that are closer together and have the hardware configured to function. After that it should just be BIOS settings to get everything properly recognized/initialized. Brilliant thanks, I'll try it this weekend a let u know how it goes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CR6 Posted October 28, 2011 Share Posted October 28, 2011 Hi Rocky, My 2 cents: I personally never use cable select because of the possiblity the mobo/OS may still not consistently recognize it (i.e. sometimes on boot up it works and sometimes it won't). It is not very hard to set jumpers to master/slave so it's worth the little bit of extra effort. Main problem is if there is no reference diagram on the HD for setting jumpers. Does yours have a diagram? If you have two IDE slots on your mobo, you should put the DVD drive and HD on seperate cables, and make them both master. If you only have one IDE controller (like on the newer SATA mobos) I actually usually put my master drive on the end of the cable, and the slave in the middle one if there are two HDs. However, if you have to share a DVD and HD on one cable, I would make the HD the master and it would have to be using the middle connector because of the typical layout of the case where the DVD is at the top. A couple more pieces of info may be useful from you: 1) What is the make and model of the PATA HD? Nowadays you can pretty much google it and find out the jumper settings there is no diagram on your HD itself 2) What motherboard are you using? If it's an old one it may not have the proper controller to take advantage of newer PATA drives, although the newer PATA HDs should be backwards compatible ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky Posted October 28, 2011 Author Share Posted October 28, 2011 Armed with the above info I will be trying again in a few hours. I am attaching a photo of the jumpers, you can see why I am confused, there are 4 different sets. Its a hitachi deskstar. The mobo is a Dell with only one parallel slot, at the moment it uses only 1 SATA HD, the parallel port is only used for the DVD Drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ROCO*AFZ* Posted October 29, 2011 Share Posted October 29, 2011 Rocky, what controller is it using? Some 3rd party controllers on IDE drives (like jmicronare not recognized as bootable without a special driver installed. In XP these could only be loaded via floppy or preloaded with the pc's oem disk. Also you are giving your friend a death star i mean deskstar? They were noted for dieing horrible deaths before and after IBM sold that part of there company off (due to high drive returns). I wouldn't do that to my friend lol. As Buehgler_AS and CR6 stated... Do not jumper as cable select. Some main board required back in the day that bootable hdd be master at the end of the IDE cable. Make sure the DVD or CD also is not jumpered as cable select. PC manufactured thought... hmm cable select will help users by auto recognizing where it is. Real world = lots of devices work fine by themselves on cable select but get confused when something is added. When not using cable select, one has to be jumpered as master and one as slave. As for heads... not sure as deskstars are the only ones that had these odd settings (and very old maxtors) try each and look to see what gb you get as i think one shows less then the other. Also if not the more recent service packs of XP (like no service pack and SP1 if i remember right) XP will not properly recognize over 160GB drive. This was raised in SP2 i do believe. Not sure if your drive is that big, but food for thought. As stated also, the 80 pin are the faster IDE cables if the drive supports it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky Posted November 3, 2011 Author Share Posted November 3, 2011 Just to close this one out, I tired every combination of cable and jumper I could, and the best I got was the PC recognised the DVD Drive OR the HD, but never both at the same time! So, I pulled out that P-ATA HD I was trying to set up and soncentrated on the existing HD to see if I could recover it. I stuck it in another PC and pulled off all the my docs and stuff to backup, put it back in the original PC and formatted it, and did a clean install of Win XP Home (Repair or install-over did not work). It booted okay, and I copied all the my docs etc over, so it was good as new. Apart from one thing. New Thread. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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