I attempted to install a new Seagate 120GB IDE drive. Cable out of #1 IDE port off the TekRam motherboard has 2 ends; about midway of the length of cable, it plugs into the IDE port. The 2 CD-ROM's one connected by the end cable plug, and the other CD-ROM and the system drive (Western
Digital)are connected with remaining plugs in from the end plug of the cable. If I unplug any of the existing plugs from one of the CD-ROMs, and plug it into the new Seagate HD, and it is 'jumpered' to be a primary slave drive, it does not work, and I get the error message on the boot screen, "Missing NTLDR file, crtl, alt, del, to restart" -- any ideas out there? Is this a cable problem?

Eth!?!

"about midway of the length of cable, it plugs into the IDE port"

Umm the cable goes from the ide port on the mainboard to the first ide device and then to the 2nd ide device.

Never is a ide cable connected with the middle cable connector to the mainboard ide port with each end then connecting a ide device. So you can see my confusion with what you write.

"jumpered to be primary slave drive" The primary is determined by what ide channel its on. Your system has two. One is primary and two is secondary.

So this drive is configured as slave. On this one cable what is the other device and what is it configured for? Master?

Does the bios see the 120gig drive when hooked up? It must see the original drive or you wouldn't get the message about ntldr.

Are you sure you don't have a floppy disk in or that this "new" drive didn't have W2K on it formerly and its trying to boot?

Reason I ask is that something is saying ntldr not found. This is like saying msdos.sys or io.sys was not found as oppossed to win.com not found. This is usually not the issue when adding a drive.

There is always the issue of drive compatablity. Not all drives play well together as master/slave. Older models have problems running newer models. Best of have the new drive as master and the old as slave.

Wanderer,

Thanks for your reply. Yeah, the cable connected in the middle is really weird, but so was the guy who built this cpu. The end of this cable went to the 1st CD-ROM drive, then the next cable plug to the 2nd CD_ROM, and then the 3rd cable plug from that end, went into the old WD hard drive! I believe the error message is coming from the boot looking for that info on the new drive, rather than the old c: drive.

As far as the system 'seeing' the 120GB drive, we had to jumper it so it saw it as a 32GB drive before we partitioned it.

We are starting over with new cable, and going to use IDE port #1 for the new and old hard drives only, then IDE port #2 for the 2 CD-ROM devices. Hopefully this will solve the problem.

Thanks. Any other ideas on this is most appreciated.