I tried everything. I'm destitute! I have three IBM 7200rpm HD's, all with NTFS partitions and all working fine. The thing is I am unable to have windows XP detect the slave hard drive. The jumpers are correct set to slave, power works, ATA-100 cables work fine. The primary works fine and is detected by the bios, the other two are not detected no matter what I do. I attached each hardrive to the second part of the ATA 100 cable running from the primary to the slave (didn't work) then I reversed it. No go. Then I hooked them up separately one by one to a separate ide port on the motherboard (having primary by itself in primary port). Still no. I reset the CMOS. Intermittently on each boot it would not recognize primary but upon CMOS reset it works fine (resognizes primary but not slave). I NEED SOME HELP FROM A GENIUS! I'm running athlon 1100 on asus A7V MB (XP OS). Primary HD is 60g second is 18g and third I think was 15g. I just want at least one slave to work is that asking too much???? Any help would be appreciated. This is the best forum in the world by the way, it has been my guru for 6 years now.

Jumper settings?

Check your jumper settings on the hard drives. If the drive is not detected by the BIOS then your O/S will not see it.

dude..first calm down and don't yell if you are going to expect help from anyone.
well set ur hard drive to cable select and see if it detect your hard drive.
if it still no go..then you should try to upgrade ur bios to the newest version aviliable at www.asus.com
you tried that yet?
if it still doesn't work...then it might be the controller that is faulty , its time to rma your board.
good luck.
there is really nothing you can do IF you tried messing around with jumper setting and all the configurations and the bios still won't detect your hard drive.
good luck.

and by the way there is nothing got to do with ur operating system.
so not to worry, its got to do with ur bios.
or you can set it to manual configuration instead of auto, can you try that and see if it recongnizes that hard drive?

Dude,
I do't know if you have already dones this but make sure that your primary is set to master, or master w/ slave. I know that several HD do this diffrently. Yes, there a seperate jumper setting for Master w/ Slave on some HDs. And double check the slave jumpers. Watch out for which side the jumpers do start on(Pwr side or cable side). The little pictures on the HD can be misleading.

On the side note, you have to set the jumpers to primary if your testing the drives by themselves.

Ryan,

For us computer illiterates out there...what does 'rma your board' mean?

RMA - is "Return Merchandise Authorization"; its how you have to return faulty products to their manufacturer for a replacement product.

Thanks Milo.

Thanks guys, I had already upgraded bios to the latest version a few days before posting this message and I had already tried every jumper setting possible (including cable select and no jumpers at all). I still can't understand it?? I've never been stumped before. If it was controller failure then it wouldn't recognize primary as well (which it does since I'm using it now.) I hav 2 ATA-100 (blue) ports on my board so I even hooked second hard drive (w/jumpers set to slave of course) by itself to the second ATA-100 port (using ATA-100 ide cables of course)(not attached to primary ide cable) and still nothing??? Anybody have the smarts??? Anyone???

Actually, I have the smarts. Thanks to everyone who tried but I figured it out. It WAS the OS! After all! I guess some files got corrupted and prevented the system from accessing more than one drive. Solution? Simply re install XP (as upgrade or repair only! otherwise you'll reformat and lose all your files). I am now able to view hard drives and funny thing the jumper cables are not even set correctly but I left them that way anyhow. Simply the first part of your ide cable will usually be Master and Second part slave (I currently have the Master HD jumper set on one ide and it is reading it as slave because it's on the 2nd part of the ide cable),. Hope this helps other people who get stumped by this in the future. No computer has ever beaten me and none will ever beat me! I have never lost a single file in ten years! I am KING!!!!!