Primary/Slave Harddisk Changing

[Hypo]

Ok, my harddisk had crashed and was giving a lot of problems. I disconected the bad one and installed Win98 on the other HD. Max 40, Amputate Your Head and everyone else were a real big help, thanks once again! Now everything is working fine but I need data from the first HD.

So when I reconnect the 2nd harddisk the computer tries to boot up from that and gives me some boot error. How do I connect both harddisks but boot from the one where I have re-installed windows? I tried switching the cables but it still boots the corrupted harddisk first.

Is it some jumper settings or is it a BIOS option? I have some mercury motherboard.

[Amputate Your Head]

It's both Hypo... look on the drives themselves and you should see a jumper map. Make sure to set the pins jumper correctly for Master & Slave respectively.
Then when you are booting, go into the bios and set your Primary Master & Slave settings to "Auto Detect" if you can.... if you can't use an "Auto" feature, you'll have to input the drive settings manually. Then you should be able to boot up and see both drives in your tree.
Lemme know if you run into any snags...

[Hypo]

How do I know which is the correct jumper setting for master/slave on the harddisks?

[Amputate Your Head]

There should be a little map/chart physically on the drive, usually close to the jumper, or sometimes on the top.

[Amputate Your Head]

Originally posted by Hypo:
So when I reconnect the 2nd harddisk the computer tries to boot up from that and gives me some boot error. How do I connect both harddisks but boot from the one where I have re-installed windows?

Hypo, once you get your jumpers set on the discs for master & slave, check your cable too... make sure it's connected from the Primary plug on the motherboard straight to the drive you wanna boot off of, then plug the extra center plug on the (primary) cable to your slave drive.

If none of this is working, try setting both drives up as Masters, and going Primary to your new boot drive, and secondary plug (with a separate ribbon) to the other (damaged) drive. Set up the bios for which one is Primary and Secondary respectively, and check your boot sequence to make sure it's booting from the right one (primary) first. Depending on your setup, you may have to just unplug your CD drive to do this, as is the case on my board... my burner is my secondary drive, and my mirror for the hard disk is a slave off the primary. (hope I'm not losing you here)

Haven't seen anything back from ya yet, so was just wondering if you're stuck on something?

[Hypo]

Well I just finished setting everything up. Took me more time than necessary, cos all the screws and pins were extra tight, and I had to change the harddisks around, but I got it done! Thanks again!

But now I have one extra disk showing in my explorer, drive D - Drive C, E, F and G are the correct partitions. When I click on D it gives a message 'drive D is not accessible'. Nor sure where that came from. I also have a A floppy drive and H and I CDRom and Writer. Not sure if this extra drive will go away on booting.

[Amputate Your Head]

Are you able to access the damaged drive though? Once you can get in there, you can copy the stuff you need to save and then format that bad boy. Then set up everything however you like... I would strongly recommend a hard disc mirror... that would prevent this from happening again.

[Hypo]

Oops, forgot to mention that. That harddisk is working good as new now. There was probably only some boot sector problem which windows fixed up by itself. Its showing all my files now and I've copied the important ones.

[Hypo]

Whats a harddisk mirror?

[Xero]

Hypo,

I have also had the problem. The jumpers and cables are in correctly, but when the master HD with the good copy of Win98 trys to boot and sees that the slave HD with the messed copy of Windows, it will fail to boot.

-Xero

[Amputate Your Head]

Originally posted by Hypo:
Whats a harddisk mirror?

Two ways you can do it...

1. An additional hard drive that your data is written to at the same time as your main drive. You operate as usual, but (for example) when you save *mystuff.doc*, it's written to both drives at the same time. The second drive is basically an exact duplicate of the first.

2. Connect up a slave drive in your system, and use a program like PowerQuest DriveImage 5 to create an *image* of the hard drive. You can do it with CDRWs too, but it's much slower. If down-time is a factor, image it onto another hard drive, because it can only be done in DOS mode, so if you're running a server or something... you're down the whole time it's running.
Imaging 10 gigs to another hard drive will usually take about 45 minutes with a 1 gig cpu. The nice thing about this is it eliminates the need for backing stuff up onto CDs or anything else. If something gets corrupted, or even if your main drive goes tits up, you can boot off the DriveImage rescue floppys and restore the entire hard drive back to where it was without losing a single preference or setting.... SHAZAM!
Or you can restore just a single file. It's very versitile.