Picked up a 'puter free from a friend. It has XP on the HD, Bios doesn't see the drive. I installed another HD as master, figged the XP drive as slave. Bios sees it now as primary slave, but stalls before loading the master OS. Also won't finish POST with a boot floppy. Will load floppy or master OS with slave disconnected. The master is ATA 133, the slave ATA 100. Do they have to be same? Is this causing the conflict? Other thoughts? JR Dweller in the cellar
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(Cable Select). That way I can have two different bootable drives plugged into the same cable. The computer decides which is the master or slave. I have used the free program "XXCLONE" to duplicate the master drive on the slave drive. That way I have a recent backup copy in reserve stored in a place away from the computer. I bought a copy of Norton Ghost 14.0 A totally useless program for what I wanted to do.
What brand is the drive? If its a Seagate 'Barracuda' it may be suffering from a firmware bug. Also, the drives should be configured as Cable Select (with the proper cable) for most newer motherboards. You can't mix M/S and C/S drives & cables. having two different speed drives on the same cable makes them both run at the lower speed. Also, what OS is on the replacement drive? It needs to be NTFS, like XP if you expect to read the second drive.
Dead or dying drive. If there's something valuable on it that you need, stop dinking with it and call a data recovery service--they'll open it, fix it, and read whatever they can for you, for a (high) price. Dinking with it just reduces the likelihood of their being able to recover anything.
If you are doing this for fun or as a learning experience and the data on the drive isn't of high value, keep trying with it as slave and you might eventually get a successful boot--if that happens image-copy the whole thing before you shut down because you probably won't get a second chance.
If you are looking for an excuse to buy a tool, get an EIDE to USB adapter (should be about 20 bucks and it's a useful thing to have in your tool kit--some of the newer ones will handle SATA as well), boot the machine, then plug into a USB port--might not show at all, might show and freeze until the driver times out, might work well enough to recover the contents.
I think floppy disks may all have reached their alloted lifespan. I've watched most of my old Win98 boot floppies die while trying to read them. CDs can be made to emulate boot floppies:
If the BIOS permits you can make a flash drive bootable.
it from the machine and install an operating system on the new drive. If you want to try to access data from the old drive connect it via a USB to IDE adapter. That may, or may not, work depending on the failure mode. If the drive has critical data that needs to be recovered, enlist the services of a data recovery dirm.
Hmmm. I'm dimly recalling that when it won't get past the post, that reseating the RAM cards and the video card and any other cards in their IDE slots some times was the solution. It's been years since I've had to think of that, so I may be remembering incorrectly, but it's little work to try that.
RWL
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