What the hell am I doing wrong

I've already gotten tired of swapping cables between my extra HD and CD-burner. It take too long to keep tranferring files that I want from drive to drive just to put them on a disk.

The stupid fucking computer isn't able to read both a CDR-drive and a HD on a single 3 way IDE cable. I already tried putting the HD's on the same IDE cable and can never get it to boot, if I get it to, the extra drive isn't recognized.

In the BIOS setup, it will only recognize 1 item of hardware per IDE cable. Even if two are connected it only sees the one closet to the MB.

So my question..

How do I make the computer recognize 2 HD's and the CDR Drive with only 2 IDE connection. And a 3 way cable won't work?

I also don't understand why it won't work. But this isn't really my most knowledgable field either.

 

well im assuming that your BIOS reads a primary and secondary, master and slave.

make sure your drives are set for master, slave, or cable select. older computers can be really finiky, as cable select doesnt always work. some new computers only work on cable select.

get new cables. back in the olden days i ran into a few pc's that wouldnt recognize devices because of the cables. are you using an 40pin ATA (super-thin), or 40pin regular cable?

 

I'm using regular 40 pin cables.

The BIOS does have a Primary and Secondary configuration, but it doesn't seem to ever detect the secondary. I'm going to try reformatting the drive and see if it'll detect it.

If I can't get it to do what I need it to do, I'm just going to tranfer all my files from the 20G to the 30G and just deal with it for a while, then when I have some extra cash, just get an 80G or something. All this work is far from worth it for 50G's.

 

jumpers?

 

reformatting wont do it.

 

+1 for jumpers.
Set the HD to Cable Select and put it closer, set the CDR to Cable select or Slave and try again.
Reformatting is not going to help... that's not going to fix why BIOs doesn't recognize the drives.

 

jumpers? What am I supposed to do with them or put them?

Autodetect in BIOS just registers as an Unknown device when I have both devices connected

 

oh my god.

the jumpers are on the back of the drives, usually near the IDE connector.

 

You have to set the jumpers on the drive correctly. The jumper pins are next to the power plug on the back of the hard drive (or other device).

 

jumpers did it.

Thanks

 

also known as ...jumpers...