IDE hdd not recognized
August 6th, 2016
I’m trying to install a second hdd (ide/pata style hdd) into my pc for extra storage. I know the ide hdd works cause it works fine in another pc. When i connect my ide/pata hdd to the motherboard the computer starts, i don’t see the “starting windows” logo, instead of the desktop screen i get the blue screen of death. I tried connecting the ide drive as cs/slave etc but pc refuses to boot. I used different ide ribbon cables to connect the ide hdd but it had no effect. If it makes a difference my main hdd is connected by sata cable. The boot order inside BIOS’ “main” tab shows 1st drive none, 2nd drive none, 3rd drive is my main hdd, 4th drive cd, could this be the issue? I tried to change the main hdd to 1st, inside BIOS, but the system will not allow me to make any changes. Also pata adapter is enabled in BIOS. I know I can buy an IDE to SATA adapter to get the drive to work but I don’t have the space inside the case for the adapter. Any help would be appreciated.
You should disconnect all the other drives and manage to enable booting from the single IDE drive while connected to the PATA cable. If you have removed the IDE drive from another computer and it worked before, it should now be recognized. The bios will tell you during boot if it is a MASTER or SLAVE in IDE mode. Some manufacturers have the optical drives set as MASTER and the hard drive set as a Slave which will conflict when adding another drive on the same cable as a replacement. The jumper on the back of the drive tells you what mode its set for.
You can use the drive in Slave mode but if its set as an Active Partition – this can confuse the boot manager having several Active partitions, unless you have control of the option to set which drive you want to boot first.
The issue is most likely because the drive has an operating system and drivers meant to boot from the 1st PC system that you are now trying to boot from a second system that it isn’t compatible with and the result is the Blue Screen. In this case, you have to backup your files and then format the drive to use as a backup or SLAVE drive. To use as a MASTER boot drive, you need to reinstall the OS and drivers unless the motherboard is the same. There are other ways to try to make the drive work on alternate hardware but you will risk loosing all your files and programs on the drive you are trying to get to boot as a MASTER.
Well it does look like you have a tricky dicky motherboard bios there!
Had something a bit similar with an old MSI P4 board.
Anyhow, set your IDE drive to ‘master’, plug her in, and see if you can follow what I found here..
The particular board I am using the anus M2n68-la comes in many newer dual core AMD processor equipped machines, especially in HP systems. It's a nice board with considerable flexibility and plenty of room for upgrades. The standard bios for this board is Award which has a few shortcomings on the documentation side and help menus although it is very flexible once you find your way around by a bit of peeking and poking-- not recommended for the inexperienced, but there's always the cancel and exit option so it does no harm to explore a bit as long as you don't save any changes you are unsure about.
To solve this mixed hard drive situation in the boot order there are two areas of concern To start the process make sure all drives are recognized on the front page. That being done and found correct, the next step is to shift over to the boot page at the top menu. There are then two sections of concern. Generally if you are needing to use interchangeable boot media you'd want to place the optical drive group as number one, then shift down to the number two spot and make that the hddr group, note that award's bios on this board treats all such devices according to type and not by connection, even external drives will be grouped according to the media type and not the method of connection.
This is handy if you keep a backup with a bootable restore setup on a removable usb hard drive. note however the choice of the group from which the boot device is located is just the first step you can setup as many choices of groups as needed here up to 5 but the next step is to tell the bios which particular drive among the group bears the OS and is meant to be the default boot drive for any particular group. To do this one needs to shift down below he line to where the particular groups are listed and select the group then hit return to bring up a menu that allows you to select a particular drive using the =- keys to move it to the top of the list. Select the particular drive which the bios conveniently identifies from the id and then save changes and ext. it should then work the way you need it to.
But a word of caution here is that although it will bypass unavailable groups in the menus it will not bypass drives within the group that are not shown as the priority drive for that group and you will have to use the f1 option at start up to tell it which drive to boot from. This can be a handy feature if you operate with more than one OS on a system as many of us do. By simply placing an inactive drive as the 1s boot drive in the group the system will not boot until you tel it which drive in the boot menu. But for the average one system guy the answer is to make sure that the drive you set as first priority for the HDdrive group is the one you want to boot from.
Probably as clear as mud, eh? well at least it gets into that strange second menu on the boot page on the bios. Have a nice, and say thanks for the help.
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=161085
Try what they suggested you, powering the computer with that hard disk only. It seems like it can be a motherboard fault or an hdd one. Check your bios thoroughly…