August 14, 2004

• This is sort of thorny, but to make sure I understand you correctly - you had a bad drive and replaced it and that worked. The original bad drive is still giving you fits? Did you connect the old/bad drive to the second channel on the primary chain (i.e. the same cable as the new one)? If so, you may have a bad controller instead of a bad drive. It's unlikely in the extreme, but not unheard of. Otherwise, I would put money on the original drive being bad. In that case, Dell should replace it without too much hassle. You may need to run some diags against it with phone support, but I'd recommend doing it before had. Both Maxtor and IBM/Hitachi have drive analysis tools available (Powermax and Drive Fitness Test). If you don't want to deal with Dell, you can try your luck with the Drive manufacturer - but in my experience, you'll get better and faster service going to the OEM. HTH
• Thanks Pogo - No the drive that died is out - it just happened to be the primary (HD0) drive. My secondary (HD1) has always been fine. It's just that now that I've got a new primary drive, the secondary isn't seen by Windows. often.
• Next time it works, I would transfer everything off the D:, format it, and go from there.
• The drive not being recognized in the BIOS is different from the drive not being recognized by Windows. You said it's not seen in the BIOS, which leads me to believe there's a hardware problem rather than a software one. The fact that you just replaced one drive is probably a red herring. I think the drive is suspect and second Mr. Knickerbocker's suggestion of backing the data up, in case it goes belly-up. Then run the diagnostic tools from your HD manufacturer.
• Not sure how computer savvy you are but here goes: I suspect that you may be having problems with the "master" and "slave" settings for each of the drives. There is a jumper on the back of each drive that can be set to "master", "slave", or "cable select". The primary drive should be set to master, the secondary to slave (cable select decides for you so it's not a bad option but sometimes it can get weird on you). See if that helps. As cabingirl said, if the bios is not recognizing it than it could be something different. Perhaps the cable in the back is not connected properly or secure?
• Also: this sounds like it could be a problem with your HD controller. This is *not* an XP problem, I stress that because if it's not recognized in BIOS sometimes then it obviously is a hardware issue. 1: Genial's got it: Check the jumper settings... having both to CSEL (cable select) will probably work, otherwise set the new primary to master and the secondary to slave. Make sure that you have the ribbon cable plugged in properly too; the primary drive should be at the end of the ribbon, and the secondary should be connected in the middle of the ribbon (not sure why this is, but it's old hardware lore to do it that way). If that doesn't fix it.... 2: Unplug the new primary HD. Set the drive D to Master, plug it in as the only device on the HDC. Reboot copious times, see if it recognizes the harddrive each time. if it does, your drive is good. Repeat test with the new HD. Try switching in different ribbon cables to make sure one of them isn't the problem. If that passes as well, you've got a bad HDC and need a new motherboard. If the old (drive D) HD fails to get recognized _every time_ when it is the primary device, then it's toast and yeah, try to get your data off there as quickly as possible. Anyways, I hope that helps.
• Thanks everyone for the help. Regarding the hardware issue, the drive in question has never had any trouble whatsoever. Should it have failed at the same time as the primary drive (which definitely failed, physically) would be too coincidental. Here's the catch about the BIOS. It only fails BIOS *after* it's been recognized by XP at least once, on occasion, twice or three times. Here's the really weird part: when the D drive was recognized, my "mp3" folder (about 21 Gb) and my "websites-i-made" folder (roughly 10Gb) was gone. Everything else was there. I disagree that XP is not a suspect. And I'm not totally suspect of drive D's hardware. But perhaps formatting D: would work. I'm still suspicious of the OS, namely Windows XP. I have a Debian Linux box, I suppose for the sake of science I could plug it into that, but still. It pisses me off that I would have to do *anything* but plug it in. The thing is formatted, has been working flawlessly, and there's no GOOD reason why it is recognized, and then isn't. You come to a door. Do you (a) open the door (b) choose to set the door on fire (c) turn around and watch TV. >?
• oh and regarding ian's (d) suggestion: can I plug D in as the boot drive without setting it up as the boot drive via fdisk?
• This exact same thing happened to me & it turned out to be the power connector into the back of the fuckin HD chassis itself was loose. Not BIOS, not XP, not anything except the little power plug heating up and the metal/plastic expanding the pins 1mil away from the connectors, thus cutting power, poof: HD not detected anymore. Took me ages to work out why it was intermittent. I put a thin plastic shim under the plug in the back of the HD and not a problem since. Probly not the answer for you, but I throw it out there anyway in hopes it keeps the thread alive and someone else supplies the juice you need.