I got a hard-drive that's really annoying. It all started when I read that having a paging file on a seperate hard-drive would improve performance. My IBM 30GB HD is known to be a slow piece of crap (wish I knew that before I bought it), so it would help to have the paging file on another HDD. OK so I grabbed a 6.4GB Quantum HDD lying around and installed it. I kept on trying and trying but the HDD refused to be detected. I my 30GB on IDE0 as primary, and my CDRW on IDE1 as primary. My 6.4GB drive would not be decected as slave on either of the IDE channels. It only worked under 2 condictions: a) 6.4GB as primary on IDE0, 30GB as slave b) 6.4GB on IDE1, ONLY on 1st connector. b is messed up. An IDE cable has 2 connectors, the 6.4GB would only be detected on the 1st conenctor but not the second. That's really stupid. I then pulled out an ultra old 170mb HDD from an ancient computer lying in my closet and hooked it up. IT WORKED EVERY TIME IN EVERY CONDITION, argh! I tested these drives in other computers in the house. In a Celeron 800mhz machine, the EXACT problem occured. In a PII300 machine, everything worked fine. Now how the hell do you explain this? My current setup is a ECS K7S5A mobo with latest bios, AMD 1700+ cpu, 256mb SDram, 30GB IBM HDD, CDRW. Can anyone explain to me what's going on, cause I'm really confused.

Try changing the jumpers around on the drive. I've had a couple that would not slave in the right position, but ran fine as slaves, jumpered as primary. Go figure.