I had my dad's old computer running fine earlier today. It's a Compaq 2286. I put ram in and it accepted it fine and booted to my desktop. Then I tried to change the cd rom to a burner and now nothing is being recognized. When I boot up it's telling me it can't find the operating system, but I know there's one on there. I am positive everything is connected properly because I had it running, then shut it down, changed the cd writer to the same cables as the cd rom had been, then switched them back. After that it won't go. I am positive it's the primary master/slave and secondary master/slave settings in the bios but I have no clue what they should be set at. I tried the auto thing but it remained at "none". Could someone tell me what should be set at what in the bios? There's a floppy drive, a hard drive, a cd rom and a burner.

Thanks

The problem may be that you have the CD and the HD both set the same. But beyond that, the CD should be set up on the Secondary channel as the Master, with the HD on the Primary channel, either as a single drive or as the Master. The jumpers on the CD must be set, as well as those on the Hard Drive. Then, in BIOS setup you should be able to Auto select them. Try this and let us know. We've all been through this ourselves. HTH

Hi Tracy

Couple steps you need to try.

Switch the power off at the wall socket before going into the case.

Check to see if the hard drive is connected to the end conector on the IDE cable, and the jumper on the HDD is set to Master.

Make sure the Master IDE cable is connected to the correct controller ( im sure it is ).

Connect the burner to the end connector on the Secondary IDE cable, and set the jumper on the burner to Master. Connect the cd rom to the middle connector on the secondary IDE cable and set the jumper on the cd rom to slave. Make sure the red stripe on the IDE cable is next to the red power wire on the power connector going into the components.

Make sure all the power cables are conected correctly and firmly seated, in the sockets.

Switch on the wall socket and boot the amchine, jump into the bios and go the the advanced chipset configuration option, make sure that both Primary and Secondary IDE controlers are set to ENABLE.

Go back to the drive listing in the bios and see if the drives are now recognised, if they dont appear, select each of the options primary master secondary master etc and hit the enter key, you should get a message saying detecting drives.

Once done ( few seconds) the description should appear on screen.

Go into the boot order within the bios and set it to read floppy, hdd, cdrom.

See how you go with that, if no joy repost what messages you get within the bios and see where we go from there.

Regards

Janos

Thanks Janos! It worked! That was awesome info you gave me...thank you so much :)

I have another question though...now that I have these settings correct I don't want to screw it up.

What I did was put in the old hard drive (just because I was familiar with what was on it) and didn't put the burner in yet. So it has the floppy, the small hard drive and a cd rom. I need to add a burner to that and need to change the hard drive to a bigger one. There is an OS on the new hard drive already. The reason I want to ask this first is because I had just simply tried unplugging the old hard drive and plugged the new one in and it gave me that long message saying that windows has detected that the drive may need to be partitioned, etc. etc... I didn't want to mess things up so I switched the hard drives back again and it all boots up fine. Can you help me with this?

Where did this new hard drive come from? If it was taken from another machine, chances are you're gonna run into problems because of different hardware configuration, chipset drivers, etc...it's almost always best to start with a formatted drive & a fresh install of your OS.

Also, if you're gonna install a burner, you really don't need a 2nd CD-ROM drive...if you wanna copy CDs, the burning software will copy all the data to a temp folder, then promt you to swap disks, then transfer the data to the CDR or CDRW disk.

Hi Jam

Thanks for your input. If I put in only the burner and she did want to copy cd's, how big of a hard drive would she need to do that? The one thats in there now is just little...like 2 gb? The one I'm trying to change it to is 20 gb. What kinds of things would I have to change in order to use the other hard drive? It already has xp on it and has been used a bit.

You are welcome tracy. Glad I was able to help.

In respect to the new bigger hard drive, same setup applies.

How ever, the fact the Hard drive has an os on it that will need to be removed and you will need to perform a complete clean install of Windows.

I disagree with Jam connect your cd rom and burner, spin your discs with your cd rom and use the burner for its intended purpose, ( burning ) it is cheaper to replace a cd rom more often than to replace a burner ( just dpends on your usage ).

As far as the size of the HDD is concerned if you split the Hard drive down the middle for win 98 that will work quiet well. So you will need to remove the partition or partitions on the hard drive using the win 98 installation floppy, reboot, use the same procedure to create the primary partition C drive, and the extended partition, D drive, on you hard disk.

After all the partitions have been created you will need to format them, once format is complete install the Operating System on the C Drive. Dont forget to install the Motherboard Chipset drivers right after initial boot of windows.

Hope that helps a bit more.

If you need any more info be glad to pass it on.

Good luck

Janos

Well, I was merely making the point that a 2nd CD device isn't necessarily required...but I guess now it's my turn to disagree....

1st of all, burners are cheap...if you pay more than $20 (after rebate) for a 52x24x52, you're paying too much. 2nd, CD-ROM drives are gradually disappearing from the market...they're being replaced by DVD-ROM drives, which of course, are more expensive. 3rd, if your copy the data to the hard drive 1st, you lessen the chance of errors than by copying directly from CD-ROM to CD burner. Also (& this may cause another debate), if you want to copy CDs directly, the CD burner & CD-ROM drive should not share the same IDE channel (i.e. they should not be on the same cable)...this is because "each IDE/ATA channel can only deal with one request, to one device, at a time. You cannot even begin a 2nd request, even to a different drive, until the 1st request is completed. This means that if you put two devices on the same channel, they must share it. This means that any time one device is in use, the other must remain silent. In contrast, two disks on two different channels can process requests simultaneously. The bottom line is that the best way to configure multiple devices is to make each of them a single drive on its own channel, if this is possible"...if it's not possible (& it's generally not unless you have an add-on IDE card), the hard drive should be the primary master, the CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM) should be the primary slave, & the burner should be the secondary master...if you have a 2nd hard drive, it should be the secondary slave.

* above in quotes taken from pcguide.com

As for the 20GB hard drive with OS, I personally have never had any luck swapping a drive that already has an OS installed. I've tried it a few times but it's usually unstable & I've always ended up reformatting & installing the OS from scratch anyway.

Hi Jam

Did I read something about copy to and from in your post.

Hate to tell you this but thats a breach of copyright. Can i make a small sugestion, remove that bit and repost.

There is nothing wrong with what you say about the configurations, you can also setup the dvd rom as secondary slave and the cd rom as a primary slave also. It realy dosnt matter just dpends what you want to DO.

Just depends on the individual and what they are looking for.

I agree as far as the hard drive is concerned, a reformat is almost a must, but I have seen ( not done ) drives being swaped from one cm to another with the os still there and it worked without any probs.

Doesnt happen very often but it can, just depends on the system config.

Whats a 52x24 i thought they were out of date. I havent seen a 52x24 for some weeks now they are all 52x32 now.

Most mobos on the market now have IDE raid, you can load the OS on the HDD while connected to the primary controller, engage the raid controller within the bios, set the bios to use the raid controller as ATA load the driver into the os while still connected to the primary controller. Shut down the system change the HDD to the 1st raid IDE connector. Connect the cd rom to the primary controller as a master.

Jump into the bios as you boot with the single drive on the raid IDE connector change the boot order to read SCSI CDROM, and whatch the comp perfom.

Regards

Janos

Breach of copyright? Are you referring to the talk about copying CDs? From what I've read, it'd perfrectly legal to make a SINGLE copy of a copyrighted disk for backup purposes...for the personal use of the original purchaser only. I was in no way suggesting or recommending mass reproduction for distribution.

About the 52x24x52 burners...that's why they're so cheap...the manufacturers are clearing out new old stock. I think OfficeMax has em on sale for $10 (after rebate) right now...& most of them are repackaged Lite-On's

Hi Jam

Nice one Jam.

I wish we had them that cheap here. I would be out there with a truck buying the things.

The copyright rules are not as relaxed here, for us it is ilegal to make a duplicate regardles of the reason. Backup or no backup, the copyright laws says it is ilegal regrdles.

Anyway, lets hope tracy has her problem sorted out.

Regards

Janos

Ok,

I tried to put the hard drive in (with the OS) and tried to format it but it still tells me there's no fixed disk present. I don't care about having to format it, that's nothing, but I just want to get the darn computer to recognize the hard drive. I took the old one out and plugged the new one in the same way...shouldn't that work if there was a hard drive there before? I'm really getting stressed over this darn hard drive....lol

Thanks for the suggestions...they are really helping. I will be working on that computer tonight after work!

Hi Tracy

Sorry to hear you still have probs.

yes it should work in same manner as you had things before.

A few questions, How big is the new hard drive ? as how many gig is the drive ?
What operating system is on the new drive ?
What make is the drive ?
Was the drive operational when removed from the other computer ?

The reason I ask is that if the new drive is over 30 gig in size your older mother board may not be able to support it. If it is not that big, than ht brand will be good to know. As we may be able do remove the master jumper from tha drive and connect it to the end connector of the primary IDE.

Some of the older boards didnt like having jumpers set on the hard drive.

But I will wait till you reply with the answeres to my question before sugesting anything further.

regards

Janos

Hi Janos,

Thanks so much for your help...I really do appreciate the time you're taking!

The new hard drive is a Fujitsu (I've been calling it by another name lately though...lol almost sounds similar too). It's a 20 gig hard drive. The OS thats on there now is WinXP Pro. We had it in the other tower and it was working fine. My sister was on the internet with it and she was downloading stuff. Then all of a sudden it froze and after we rebooted it, it went to XP setup and said it couldn't find the hard drive, that there were "no fixed disks present".

I really don't care about having to format it, it's just that I want it to be recognized and functional. Then I will load the OS after. It's a clean install anyway, so she wouldn't be losing much if we did have to format. I'm actually not sure what the processor type is in this tower (the one that was my dads) but maybe I am pushing it by trying to run XP on it? What's the minimum pentium class that XP can be run on?

Thanks!!

Hi

Not a prob Tracy thats what we are here for, and yes I think i can imagine the new name you have for it. Seems to me we all ahve been ther at some point in time. have you got any hair left ?

Thanks for the info, that drive should be ok and there should be no systems isues with the mother board. One thing I did forget to ask, do you get the HDD activity light on the front panel of the case to light up as the comp goes on ?

The p2 you should be no hassel I had xp Pro running on a celleron 650 without any issues but i do admit 128meg of ram is a bit low for xp. If you can slot in another stck of 128 it will improve things to no end.

Just going on what you said in your last post, I suspect 2 things.

1. A bug has come down and destroyed your boot sector, in doing so certain bugs will render the drive invisible to the rest of the system.

2. The other could be the hard drive has actualy suffered a mechanical failure. When you boot the comp can you hear the hard drive spin up ?

Few things we can try here. Bit off messing arround but we have no choice.

1 Read the sticker on the hard drive it should tell you the diffrent settings you can have. Try the Cable select settign first, and see if that works.If no go try removing the jumper alltogether and always connect the hdd to the end connector, just to maintain consistency.

If you have no luck, with eather of the 2 methods above.Follow this and see what happens. Set the hdd jumper to master again, than set the CD Rom to master also, connect the cd rom to the end connector of the secondary IDE cable, ( do not connect the burner at this time ) Jump into the bios change the boot order to read CD Rom, fllopy, HDD.

Insert the XP disk and see if the xp installer will kick in and find the drive, if it continues with the setup, and you get as far as the part where it shows you the hard drive partition, take note what format it is in. Delete the partition or partitions, once done exit the windows setup.

Remove the xp cd and shut down the comp wait a minute or two, restart the comp, go back into the bios and see if the hard drive is showing up in the bios listing, if not, highlit the primary master and hit the enter key, if the hdd is detected insert the 98 boot disk and proceed with 98 instalation.

If still no joy take your hdd and the comp to the best pc shop you know and have them test the HDD.

Thats about all i can sugest to you at this time. Let me know how you get on.

Regards

Janos

Well I think I've really gone and screwed things up now....

I got home and was going to work on it last night, so I put a network card in. I tried to boot it up and nothing came on the screen. I thought maybe it was my monitor cord because I've had problems with it before, but I tried it on my good monitor and nothing would come up - I can't see a thing. I took the network card back out and tried to boot it up again and it still won't show anything on the monitor. Have I fried this thing? Gawd, I hope not :(

Hi Tracy

Yeah sounds not so good, I suspect you may have blown some ram.

Quiet common wid SD Ram, Current DDR ram is a bit more tolorent.

The symptoms you desribe are consistend with blown ram, usaly when you hit the power button and everything lights up and all the fans start runing but you see nothing on screen usualy means blown ram. Do you get any beeps from the comp when it starts ?

But just go through the checking procedure to make sure all is connected and seated correctly.

Disconnect all power from the wall when working on computer,all connectors must be in place when you start the comp, be carefull not to touch the ram chips with your fingers, the static electricity in our bodies can and sometimes does kill the ram. If the ram is in the way remove it from the slot an place it to one side on an antistatic bag if you have one, untill you finished working with the comp, than put it back in. Same applies when handling video cards that have on card memory chips.

So about the only thing that i can sugest , if you can try the ram from that comp in another one if you have access to one and see what happens. If no display on the other comp, than the ram has gone, if you get desplay than its something else.

About all I can sugest to you at this time.

We all tend to forget that these things a re sensitive electronic componenets.

Few golden rules.

Never drop on knock the hard drive.

Never drop or knock the CD ROm - you prob wont bealive me but the CD rom is the most sensitive of all.

Handle the Ram module by its edges.
When connecting ide cables to the mother board use slow even pressure to seat the connector.
Regardles how many times we do this always make sure the pin alignment is always correct, I know that these things ahve a notch and can only be connected in a ceartain orientation but you will be amased what people do.

See how you go with that.

Regards

Janos

Dear all (jam, janos and of course Tracyb99) - can I just thank you for this discussion - Im sat puzzling over my own configuration regards three hard drives, one DVD writer, a Zip, an ata 100 controller card (mobo has two onboard ata66 slots). I think, reading through all this, that Ive set my system up cockeyed (an English expression meaning incorrectly). At the moment I have the OS drive and the zip independently set up off the mobo. On the ata controller card I have the nice new Sony dvd +/-rw drive set up on the 1st slot as master and the even nicer 120 gb drive (used for video processing) set as slave. On the second I have the old delapodated 10gb drive set up on its own as master.

Am I right in thinking I should probably set the system up as follows?

Onboard (ata 66) the OS drive (30 gb) and the 10gb drive.

ATA controller card - slot one - the Dvd writer as the master on its own so it can run independently of the 120gb drive I use for video processing.

ATA controller card - slot two - the 120 gb drive set as master AND the zip drive set up as slave? (I never use these two together so I guess no problems there regarding channel usage)

If you wouldnt mind casting an eye over that config you might just make a sad englishman sat at home on a friday night with nothing better to do very happy (not to mention continue to cement angloUS relations!)

Regards,

NB