Hi,
I was trying to put another drive on my pc to see if it was any good or not...to get pic's off for a friend. I had mine set to master and other as slave. When i booted back up, just got the ole Drive 1 & 2 not found, F1 to continue or F2 to enter setup. I unhooked the second drive and rebooted, same thing. I had 2 other known good drives and tried them, same thing. I looked in the bios settings, I tried repairing and installing windows on good drive and it wouldn't see it. I switched cables, pulled the mobo battery, same thing... I am at a loss as to what happened or what to do now... Anyone got any ideas or anything for me to try? Much appreciated! Thanks!

Did you connect the power cables (just checking)? Are the master and slave IDE Controllers enabled in the BIOS? If so, your IDE Controllers may have gone bad. Time for a new motherboard in that case.

WinSimple Software

All you did was attempt to temporarily slave a HDD to retrieve files, correct? Why the heck are you pulling the CMOS battery, switching cables, trying to reinstall XP, etc? All you had to do was install your friend's HDD on the 2ndary IDE channel as master or slave, doesn't matter which...your HDD didn't have to be touched. Did you change the jumper setting on your HDD?

Yes, power cables are connected, hard drives are spinning up. IDE Controllers - ? I checked Bios, ide drives set to auto.

Using 1 ide channel, other has 2 cd/dvd on it. I had 2 hd's on my pc already. I took my 2nd off, and attached the friends hdd, rebooted and it came up not seeing either. I had my #1 set as master #2 slave. Set friends to slave. I did all this in attempts to find solution for bios and xp not seeing 3 different drives.

Disconnect the 2 optical drives from the second IDE channel and connect only your hard drive to it. Don't forget to set the jumper to master.

The first IDE controller though sounds like its acting flaky.

WinSimple Software

Ideally, you should not pair up two HDDs or two optical drives on the same IDE cable/channel. For optimal data transfers, your drives should be configured as follows:

primary master = HDD w/OS
primary slave = optical reader
2ndary master = optical writer
2ndary slave = 2nd HDD

or as an alternate:

primary master = HDD w/OS
primary slave = optical reader
2ndary master = 2nd HDD
2ndary slave = optical writer

So, you originally had a master and slave and both were recognized. You switched out the slave with another drive and the bios saw neither the master or slave? (So obviously you couldn't boot into XP.) That's usually a bad connection or jumper issue. Make sure the second slave is jumpered the same as the original--slave or cable select.

Then you disconnect the second slave and. . . it's not clear exactly what happens then. With only the original master connected and no slave does it boot to XP?
If so, does it boot to XP with both the original master and original slave connected? If so, does XP see the slave? If not, did the bios see the slave? (The posting screen is going to flash by pretty quick and you may not be able to tell if it's showing all the drives. Hit PAUSE if necessary so you can read the screen.)

What are the model numbers of the various slave drives you've tried?

Thanks jam, i will remember that for future reference.

Okay, after screwin with it a while, I got a drive to recognize in bios, however at the first boot screen it says it is not recognized. I loaded xp on it and every time it reboots it comes up with the F1 or F2 screen, so i enter F2 - bios, and enter thru and it goes to windows. I dont get it??? It wont boot straight thru.

DAVE - Yes, i had 2 hdd's on primary, and i swapped out the #2 for friends known "troubled" drive. I had it set to slave, mine to master. When i rebooted it came up to the F1 F2 screen as i mentioned. Now i switched it all back like it was and my #1 now does nothing... it spins up but doesnt recognize. I also tried it on the secondary ide controller without success.

I thought maybe i toasted my #1 hd or something, but with all the other weirdness going on i dont know.
I may try putting it on as the slave to the new install xp drive and see what happens.

I am wondering if at some point i had my #1 set to cable select or something......would that screw it up?

Drives:
My #1 - Seagate Barracuda st3160023A 160GB
My #2 - WD 800BB Cavier 80GB
Friends - WD1200BB Cavier 120GB (Probably Bad)
My other - WD200BB Cavier 20GB

As you can tell I am not a tech guy, so thanks one and all or the help!

On the WD drives, the 20 gig and maybe the 80 and 120, have different single/master settngs. For a single drive on the cable the setting would be 'no jumper' and for the master on a cable with 2 drives it'd be jumpered on master. That probably wouldn't apply here because you've only used them as slaves but it's something to keep in mind. It also wouldn't apply if you were using cable select.

If your original master isn't booting, either by itself or with the original slave, it may be a problem with the cable. Also check in cmos/bios setup and make sure both IDE controllers are enabled. That's in addition to setting the drive types as AUTO.

Unless you zapped something while moving the drives around the master should be OK. Try a different cable and if that doesn't help connect it to the secondary port, as already mentioned.