Question: I have two Seagate barracuda 7200.10 500 GB drives pulled from an old Lacie Big Disk Extreme. ?I have been using them both in a Dell Dimension 4600 in a master slave configuration, (one by default has a jumper as master and the other has no jumper as a slave. ?This is confirmed by this article)
I inherited an Optiplex gx620 and was attempting to set up the same configuration, but I have been having difficulties. ?When each drive is connected separately as master, they are detected and work perfectly. ?However, when connected in a Master/Slave relationship, neither are detected. ?This machine is equipped with the “cable select” feature, so I attempted that jumper configuration on the drives, but I had the exact same result. ?I have tried 3 different cables and nothing makes any difference.
Does anyone have any idea why this configuration isn’t working?
Additionally, it should be noted that the PATA cable was originally connected to a DVD drive, and I’m reasonably sure that the original harddrive was on SATA with no PATA hd at all. ?I have changed the settings in the bios (A11) to disable all SATA, and enabled the two PATA connections.
Update: ?For my own sanity, I plugged both drives back into the original dimension 4600 and configured them as Master/Slave on a single IDE connector. ?Both drives were recognized and booted fine. ?I moved the exact same setup over to the new computer and it still didn’t work. ?As a result, I’m inclined to believe this is a problem with the motherboard or BIOS.
Is there any sort of setting on the board that would cause this problem?
Answer: I have seen old IDE drives misbehave with jumper settings that should work. ?Cycle through all the possible settings on each of the drives: master/slave, master/CS, Slave/CS. ?Some drives have a master setting which is Master ONLY (no other drives allowed) and another jumper with master w/slave.