Help installing slave harddrive

[big1]

Hello,

I am trying to install a harddrive as a slave to my current drive into an existing system. Though the motherboard supports RAID I am not using this aspect as far as I know ie: there is no mirroring of drives.

I am using the system to burn some wedding dvd's so the emphasis is on getting the data from my primary harddrive to the dvd burner.

My system spec:

Motherboard: ABit BD7II-Raid
Operating System: Win98se

Hardware:
Maxtor 80GB Harddrive (Primary)
NEC2510A DVD Burner
LiteOn 52X32X52X CD-RW
Floppy drive

New Harddrive-:
Maxtor Diamond Max 120GB 8MB

Lastnight I had a working system, but due to too many things going on a friend offered to install the new harddrive I had received into my system for me. To him, this involved ripping out all the ide cables and starting from scratch. :eek: As far as I can tell, it is now ordered this way:

IDE1 > Primary (80GB) Harddrive -slave- dvd burner.
IDE2 > Cdrw -slave- floppy drive.
IDE3 > Blank.
IDE4 > New 120GB harddrive.

It worked when he left lastnight, or at least the new 120GB harddrive was detected in the bios (it is set to automatic) during bootup and showed itself in windoze. Then he left.

I reboot. Only to find the new harddrive detected during boot, but not apparant to windoze 98se.

Furthermore when I try to burn a dvdr in Nero, the process is somewhat erratic. Where as the buffers used to be full of data to write, they are now 1% full upto 60% full, back to 10% full down to 2% full etc. The whole process takes exactly twice as long now as it did yesterday. :(

My questions therefore are; How do I set the system up and in what order should the devices be connected, so that I maybe able to get the maximum throughput of data from the primary drive to the dvd. But at the same time be able to use the new harddrive for extra storage?

Thanks!

[mgb_dvd]

Check for a mixture of cable-select and master/slave on the drives,
sometimes having a slave as cable select works for the bios but not windows.

Generally don't mix hard drives and cd/dvd on the same channel, it lowers the performance of the hard drive.

[cjb110]

right

bit confused by the floppy as that isn't an ide device (unless its ls120 or a zip maybe)

But this is how I would have done it:

Main drive (the one with OS etc) as Primary Master. Main burn device as Primary Slave.
Data drive as Secondary Master. 2nd Burn Device as Secondary Slave.

You don't need to involve the 3rd and 4th channels...although I think I know why he might have done this, as in some boards its these (which are connected to a different chip) that support ATA133.

If this is the case then:
IDE1/Pri Master: Main burning device
IDE2/Secondary Master: 2nd Burning Device.
IDE3 Master: Main HD
IDE4 Master: 2nd HD (3rd and 4th HD's go as slaves to the two other HD's)

[cjb110]

oops forgot to mention, that on the 2nd method you will need a floppy disk with the raid(even if you don't use it for raid) controllers drivers on when you install the OS. Which is why I don't bother on mine, no floppy drive.

[big1]

right

bit confused by the floppy as that isn't an ide device (unless its ls120 or a zip maybe)


It was a zip 100. Sorry, I should have said :( It has been removed now anyway, as it hardly got any use.


But this is how I would have done it:

Main drive (the one with OS etc) as Primary Master. Main burn device as Primary Slave.
Data drive as Secondary Master. 2nd Burn Device as Secondary Slave.

You don't need to involve the 3rd and 4th channels...although I think I know why he might have done this, as in some boards its these (which are connected to a different chip) that support ATA133.

If this is the case then:
IDE1/Pri Master: Main burning device
IDE2/Secondary Master: 2nd Burning Device.
IDE3 Master: Main HD
IDE4 Master: 2nd HD (3rd and 4th HD's go as slaves to the two other HD's)

Well after a lot of messing around this is how it has been setup, as you sugested. The good news is that I can get some more of this dvd off the drive. So I can now burn at full speed and in a normal time-frame again - Thank you! :)

The not so good news is that despite best efforts. Whenever the new 120GB Maxtor Plus 9 drive is connected, it shows in the bios but removes the dvd and cdrw from windoze!? :?:

So when I bootup, I can access my main drive with the new drive showing. But cannot access the new drive at all. Why, I don't know... But if the new drive is disconnected during bootup it disapears from the bios and the dvd\cdrw drives show again. Which is really annoying as you can probably imagine.

Thank you cjb110 for the configuration and of course mgb_dvd for the sugestions. If you either have any other advice or opinions I would be grateful to hear them.

[cjb110]

double check the jumpers on the drives, they should all be on master.
check the bios as well, if its got an autodetect use it.

[big1]

I just thought I would provide an update and say; Thanks again! It ended up being the harddrive unit itself. For some reason, as soon as it booted up it reset itself !? Or forgot that it had been fdisked\formatted. In the end I gave up and called a mate, he took the drive out. Replaced it with another Maxtor 120GB he had in stock and up came the additional storage. He is RMA'ing the drive back to Maxtor, which saves me the trouble :)