Community Newsletter: Q&A: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing
- 9/28/07 3:22 PM
RE Slave hard drive is seen and not seen
by 22522252 - 9/29/07 7:56 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Wendy,
I had a similar problem. My slave drive would be there and sometimes disappear even when it showed up for work. Sometimes it wouldn’t even show up when booted. I installed an IDE drive in a SATA system with an IDE conversion cable. When I replaced the drive with an SATA drive and used the SATA cable. All worked FINE.
Are you using the proper cable/ribbon for that drive? Don’t use any adapter. People use all kinds of adapters to save money/ I find you will have to do away the adapter and do it the right way so actually you lost money when you bought the adapter and went the proper way after all.
Also when you have a problem with your computer and don’t have a clue. Go back and see what you did last to improve the system or any modification you did. Computers don’t just sit there and say lets surprise her today and do ??? I have seen users that said I didn’t do anything. Once questioned, I find they did do something. Sometimes the something is their kids on their computer installing and doing what they do.
One more thing, is the hard drive new? Under warranty? It may be just bad and you can contact the mfg. Of that drive via the web and they are great in exchanging the drive for a good one but you need to make sure the drive is under warranty. Even if the drive was given to you it may have warranty.
Hope this helps,
Wb . . .
Peek-a-Boo Drive
by mikem3 - 9/29/07 8:02 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Wendy,
This could be a cable problem.
If you are using the HDD Flat Cable from your
5 year old machine, it might be the wrong type.
I had a similar problem with my Sony Vaio.
Older cables share some wires with each drive, but
the newer ones allow each drive its own set.
Mike.
Hard Drive
by neddychan - 9/29/07 9:08 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
It seems your old hard drive is going to die or fail
Drives Letters Conflicting
by cnotes999 - 9/29/07 9:10 AM In reply to: Hard Drive by neddychanWendy,
It seems as though the usb drive is taking the drive letter E: from your internal hard drive. What you can do is go to disk management and select your internal slave drive with another letter as like F, or G and see if that fixes the problem. Hope that helps
Ryan
Peek-a-Boo Hard Drive
by servaes_marc - 9/29/07 9:14 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Since it seems you already have some computer knowledge, the answer is simple.
Hard drives and CD-DVD drives have three settings: Master, Slave and Cable Select. E-machines ships their systems with the hard drives set to Cable Select. When two hard drives (or a hard drive and CD-DVD drive) are connected to one IDE cable, there are two acceptable combinations that will work properly, assuming the hardware is not defective in some way.
1) Both drives set to Cable Select (the position of the cable connector determines which one is master and slave).
2) One drive set to Master and the other drive set to Slave (you manually determine which drive is master and slave).
If one drive is set to Cable Select and the other drive is set to Slave, you will get the "peek-a-boo" effect you are having. A simple jumper setting on each drive should solve your problem.
Check your eide cables.
by pishon - 9/29/07 9:20 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
The master drive has to be on the first connection of your eide ribbon cable and the slave has to be on the last (second) connection. If they are switched, the drives may show up in the bios as master and slave properly, but winxp will only pick them up sporadically.
I'm assuming you have xp.
I've read that it doesn't matter which is first on the cable, but personal experience has taught me that it does.
I'm really looking forward to being all SATA drives so you don't have to mess with the master/slave thing.
My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing
by alcreemer - 9/29/07 9:49 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I have experienced the same problem. I believe it to be a bug in XP. My computer has two external hard drives: The 'G" drive is USB attached; the 'E' drive is firewire. Occasionally, one or the other, usually the E drive, will disappear. I simply turn it off then on. It re-appears in Windows Explorer. I also have a multi-flash card reader USB attached. Attaching this device only after I have booted the computer seems to reduce the incidences of HD disappearances.
Hope this helps.
What a Load of C**p
by spike2k5 - 9/29/07 10:00 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I cant believe all the posts on this one and feel sorry for the original poster.. so far you've done everything including telling her to throw the drive away...
Please read what she stated:
She "FORMATTED" the drive.
She installed as "Slave"
and her pc bios finds it and it is available for her to use...
But sometimes!! its not showing...
Everyone is trying to help and like you lot I had a quess at the problem (drive letter clashing) but some of the answers...lol go back and read them.....
Ideas re: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing
by tabascoed - 9/29/07 10:07 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I see a lot of remarks re DVD and CD drives. Your old hard drive probably installs and works in a different way. Go to 'My Computer' and see if it appears there. If so, you may be able to live with a desktop shortcut to that drive letter. Next, check on line to see if that model hard drive required an installation disk. At 5 years old, it may not be PnP. Get an installation disk from the mfr if possible.
Finally, ask the kid down the street how he would put a game on such a disk. The method may surprise you, but chances are it will work well. I wouldn't put any important backup on this disk until I could get it to reliably appear in 'My Computer' and 'Device Manager'.
ChiliEd
Just Dont bother with that master/slave thingy!!
by brettze - 9/29/07 10:21 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
The reason is that the IDE controller has a limited bandwidth of 66mhz, 100mhz, or 133mhz depending on the age of your motherboard. If you add another harddrive, it will compete with your master harddrive for the bandwidth. The Microsoft forum suggest that the best practice is to get an external harddrive enclosure and put your old harddrive in it. What I dont like about the enclosure is that it comes with a transformer and a USB cable making it a hassle to disconnect them and put it in a safe place like your safe box or whatever. It is not a good idea to leave your enclousre too close to your computer for obvious reasons. I treat enclosures no different than flash memory cards or zip disks that I put away when not in use. Windows XP Home doesnt support RAID 0 or 1 or things like that. RAID setup allow multiple hard drives as I learned the hard way. The best hard drive enclosure around is a smaller harddrive measuring two and half inch in diameter because it is hooked to USB without the need for another cord with transfomrer that feed 12 volts to the older bigger three and half inch harddrives common around. Laptops use two and half inch disks. The other thing I dont understand is why those power supply boxes found perching under the top back side of all desktops dont have a side outlet with 12 volt connections for hard drive enclosure with power hungry three and half inch disks, all power cords are only seen inside the cases. Why cant the case makers start punching openings on the side of cases to expose one side of the power supply boxes where you can plug in a simple power cord without any transformer to it. Power supply boxes supply 5 volt and 12 volt. USB is actually a 5 volt data source. Every time I am altered to back up my hard drive , I had to go out and drag the hard drive enclosure with the ugly stupid transformer and crawl under my desk to connect that @#$#@ transformer!! Please , anyone, do not tell me that I need exercise!! I am in a thinking mode when I use my computer. I do not think and exercise at same time, thank you...
USB Drive enclosures
by patmo2711964 - 9/29/07 10:42 AM In reply to: Just Dont bother with that master/slave thingy!! by brettzeand this has what to do with anything???
The Drive Might Be Ready to Crash
by whbos - 9/29/07 2:03 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
My old external Iomega hard drive 80 GB did that just before it finally died for good. It would sometimes show up and sometimes not. It was nice enough to show up one last time letting me backup large items I hadn't backed up (I back up all the time) then the next reboot the drive was no longer visible.
This may or may not be your problem, but since you mentioned you got it from an older computer and this computer had some age to it I would make sure the next time it shows up copy over any critical files to a CD/DVD or your main hard drive.
Another thing you could do beside reformatting it is to do an FDISK on it (not sure if WinXP will let you do this) to partition the drive, then reformat it again. It could also be a CMOS thing where your computer is not really recognizing it or the drive is conflicting with other devices.
I got this as well
by Themisive - 9/29/07 2:36 PM In reply to: The Drive Might Be Ready to Crash by whbosHowever, I ALWAYS use internal drives just for speed as I'm constantly using them. As has been said, it could be any one of several things, a warning the drive is going to fail (how old is it?) or the jumpers have not been properly set, or even that it is incorrectly formatted!
I see from your post that your'e trying to save money by re-using a drive from an old machine, again there are questions. Was it an internal drive, if so did you get a proper external case for it? If it was an external drive already, what format do you use? How old is it?
As a general rule of thumb, I would take a serious look an any piece of computer hardware older than around 5 years - though they have been known to fail before that. Another thing that may cause problems is there MAY be some programe still on the drive that is causing it to partition the drive. This will not be any indicator of drive failure but will give an incorrect drive letter, since Windows will read the partion as the first letter.
The only way around this is to go to My Computer and look there, if there is something showing that shouldn't be there, the odds are it's something causing an partition.
Open the drive itself (go to windows Explorer to get this, then delete any programmes on the disk, just send them off to the recycle bin - that way if there's something you want, at least you can restore it later - then re-format the disk. It should be back to normal now.
second hard drive
by pelaezbefer - 9/29/07 5:07 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
si tu disco nuevo es ide debes colocar el disco antiguo como esclavo en la misma correa de aquel: los 2 discos deben tener el mismo sistema de archivos, ejemplo: fat 32 o ntfs. si el el disco nuevo es sata debes colocar el viejo como master, tambien concordando el sistema de archivos. fernando pelaez
disappearing drive letters
by ldmcgaffie - 9/29/07 7:04 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I read thru all of the responses and none of them seem to match what is going on. The problem is in you bios if the hard drive is internal.
When you boot up your machine hit esc of what ever f1-9 number to get into the bios. if the hard drive is not listed there as slave then you need to reflash you rom. make sure the always post on power up is on. Internal drives always load before external ones. If it does not post on power up then some other device will assume that drive letter position.
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