PCFormat Forum Archive

HI ALL,
I AM HOOKING UP A SECOND HDD, SIMPLE QUESTION, SHOULD I HOOK IT UP TO IDE 1 OR 2?
CURRENTLY I HAVE AN 80GIG (WITH OS OBVIOUSLY) ON IDE1 AND CD WRITER ON IDE 2 ??? 8O

You can attach the new HDD to IDE1 as a slave, cause your 80 is on IDE1 as the Master. At the back of the drive is where you change the status of the drive from Master to Slave and visa versa. The pin layout is normally printed on the face of the HDD on the white labels.

An optical device such as you CD Writer can be placed on IDE2 set as Master or Slave, it makes no difference. If you place the new HDD on IDE2, then you must ensure that it is set to Master and the CD Writer to slave.

A HDD can never be a slave on its own, even if present with an Optical Drive set to Master. (At least that is how it used to be.)

Typical senario you can follow:

IDE1 Master : Main HDD with OS
IDE1 Slave : Second HDD or Optical Drive
IDE2 Master : Third HDD or Optical Drive
IDE2 Slave : Optical Drive or Fourth HDD provided there is a HDD connected as Master on IDE2

Hope that clarifies your question.

Hey Guys

Sticking to the topic of HDD's

I have a Maxtor 40GB HDD (slaved and used as a file store), and the first set of clusters on the disk has gone bad.

This means that the disk is all but unreadable by windows.
Most times when I boot, I get an error stating my D drive has developed bad sectores and scandisk needs to be run (I'm using 98SE).

The probem is, because the beginning of the drive is bad, scandisk cannot read the drive info and hangs.
I have tried Spinrite, a disk recovery util which has helped me with other drives before, but it is unable to recover the data.

I cannot format or fdisk the drive either.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

A few suggestions:

1. Dump the hard drive and get a new one.

2. If the drive is still under warranty, take it back and have it replaced.

3. This becomes tricky:

a. Partition a very small drive where you think the bad clusters are.
b. After that create a partition for the balance of the drive.
c. Just format the larger partition, use the drive as a slave, for data, etc.

Now this last step may come in handy if the drive is no longer under warranty, but I wouldn't save mission critical data on it, if it is slowly developing bad sectors.

Anyone care to back me on this? Or have alternative solutions?

jamin_za wrote:I cannot format or fdisk the drive either.

I missed this part, sorry, so step 3 won't work for you then

Ya, step 3 was what I would have done, but the FAT tables are all screwed.
I was hoping to buy a new monitor this month, but it looks like I will be getting a new HDD instead.

BTW shane, your Avatar looks like a merkin http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... elete=3584

jamin_za wrote:I was hoping to buy a new monitor this month, but it looks like I will be getting a new HDD instead.

It's not that expensive. A 40Gig will set you back about R 485-00 and a decent 17" monitor about R 975-00. Unless you are a student of course, then I can understand you don't have much of a budget

Well I am a student (part time) but I do work (full time).
Its just that between my car, my food and my entertainment - I never have more than a few hundred bucks to spare by the time the next payday rolls around, so everything I buy thats more that R250 has to be carefully budgeted.
So it looks like a HDD this month and a monitor next month.

Hey jamin_za I in DBN too... COOL..

Where you work??? I need a job bad!! Programmer!!

Sorry about double posting and about off topic but

Original Topic question, I dont think it matters, truly!!

Hey LordRage

I work for a small IT company called Business Connexion. Perhaps you've heard of us?
Anyway, we have a small development team of .NET programmers here in DBN, if you have an MCSD with +/- 2 yrs experience, we can talk - although I'm more on the desktop support side of things (I work on a helpdesk - no boo's, please!)

wolf: Shanewinter's right, it doesn't really matter where you put it. However, unless you read a lot from your cd drive, set it to ide2 as you're not sharing the same cable and the data transfers can be a bit faster.

jamin: sorry to hear about the drive. Trust me I know how frustrating that can be. I hope you backed up your stuff recently.

Guys, gals,

I decided to connect hdd 1 and 2 both to IDE1, one with OS ofcourse on master and the other drive on slave.
The reason for this is that I heard that if I connect my second drive to IDE 2 with my cd writer it will default to ATA 33 - the speed of the witer?

Is this true?

Over the weekend I had to copy 20 gig from drive 1 to drive 2 and I used Total Copy and it took ages, the fastest transfer speed I got was 3333, there was times at a lan when i copies from another pc at faster that 8000.

ST3120022A R840.00 excl Seagate® Barracuda™ ATA IV 120GB IDE Drives - ATA 100 - 7200RPM - 2MB cache
- Am picking it up on Friday from Rectron......

jamin_za - ok, tell you what. I do data-recovery and fix viruses for a living, so here's the deal: Courier the drive to me, and I'll see what I can do free-of-charge. You'll just need to pay the courier charges to and from Jhb plus the cost of any CD's that are used.

I was a student once, so I know how being poor feels - not that I'm rich (yet), but I'd like to try and help if I can. Just send me a pvt msg and I'll give you the address

Thats very nice of you thrall.
We need more people like you around.

Thanks, Thrall!

I may just take you up on that offer.

Currently my crack team of professionals are working on nagging Saharah into swapping out the drive.

I will buy the Seagate drive anyway though, as I have been through 2 Maxtor HDDs in an 18 month period and I'm sick of them.

Anyone wanna buy my HDD after I swap it out?

nuf wrote:Thats very nice of you thrall.
We need more people like you around.

Yeah, well...looks down, shuffles his feet and kicks the dirt a bit...