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woogie221u

4 Posts

12578

October 15th, 2005 03:00

problem detecting ide hard drives after installing sata

Computer:
Poweredge sc400 2.8 ghz
512 pc3200 ram (PNY)
bios Phoenix A09

I just installed a WD Raptor sata drive and wanted to use one of my old hard drives, a seagate ide hard drive as a secondary. After installing the new sata drive, I can't detect the old ide hard drive. It will detect my cd-rom drives on the other ide cable. Keep in mind this drive was working fine yesterday. It just has data on it. I've tried setting the jumpers to slave and cable select, also tried both master and slave on the ide cable. I flashed the bios to the latest and yet still nothing happens.
I tried to see if my system would detect it without the Sata drive installed... and it doesn't. On a forum, i heard someone removed the cmos battery and it worked fine. I'd rather not try that though, is it a good idea? Is my drive just dead? Cause it still spins.
Any help is appreciated.

Dev Mgr

6 Operator

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9.3K Posts

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3 Points

October 17th, 2005 11:00

This could be a limit of the chipset where you can either use SATA or the Primary IDE channel, but not both (secondary IDE channel being seperate). If I remember correctly, Dell never sold a mixture of the 2 in a single server, possibly for this same reason.

You could consider buying an IDE to SATA converter and 'make' the older IDE drive a SATA drive and connect it to the 2nd SATA channel.

woogie221u

4 Posts

October 18th, 2005 19:00

well i've read of other sc400's with both sata and ide hd setup. Not quite sure what there chipsets were, but even if that is the case. Why is it that if i remove the sata drive completely, my computer still won't detect and ide hard drive. It will detect a cd-rom drive. I've tried to different ide hard drives, 1 hitachi and 1 seagate, and neither are detected. Both drives are in perfect working condition as I installed it on 2 other computers to test them. I've also tried a different ide cable. My jumper setting are all correct. Even tried disabling the power on the cd roms to see if it was a power problem but it isn't.
On top of this problem, after trying to another ide hd, my Raptor now has some unrecoverable sectors. I receive an "unmountable boot volume," and when i try to repair with chkdsk it won't/can't. I've handled all the components carefully and took all the standard procedures when working with the internals. The raptor had a lot of data that i need. Is there anyway dell will refund me for anything, i've always trusted them til now. So now i have a computer which can't boot from sata and won't detect an ide hard drive. I could reformat the Raptor but if it has bad sectors why would i want to use it? Please help.

Dev Mgr

6 Operator

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9.3K Posts

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3 Points

October 19th, 2005 11:00

Are you jumpering your ATA drives for cable select (not master or slave)?

Also, have you tried attaching the harddrives to the cable where the CD-rom is plugged into (pull the cdrom for this testing and use that connector)?

woogie221u

4 Posts

October 19th, 2005 15:00

yes i tried on cable selet on both ide channels. And i tried on both channels with cd rom slave and hd master and the other way around. I spoke to a dell tech support and they couldn't figure it out. Its got to be something with the bios or motherboard. Strange problem. Not the hd, not the controller on board, not controller on hd, not jumper setting, not cable, not power... what else could it be. The really odd thing is that it won't pick up even without the sata connected.

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