I have two Seagate barracuda 7200.10 500 GB drives pulled from an old Lacie Big Disk Extreme. I have been using them both in a Dell Dimension 4600 in a master slave configuration, (one by default has a jumper as master and the other has no jumper as a slave. This is confirmed by this article)
I inherited an Optiplex gx620 and was attempting to set up the same configuration, but I have been having difficulties. When each drive is connected separately as master, they are detected and work perfectly. However, when connected in a Master/Slave relationship, neither are detected. This machine is equipped with the "cable select" feature, so I attempted that jumper configuration on the drives, but I had the exact same result. I have tried 3 different cables and nothing makes any difference.
Does anyone have any idea why this configuration isn't working?
Additionally, it should be noted that the PATA cable was originally connected to a DVD drive, and I'm reasonably sure that the original harddrive was on SATA with no PATA hd at all. I have changed the settings in the bios (A11) to disable all SATA, and enabled the two PATA connections.
Update: For my own sanity, I plugged both drives back into the original dimension 4600 and configured them as Master/Slave on a single IDE connector. Both drives were recognized and booted fine. I moved the exact same setup over to the new computer and it still didn't work. As a result, I'm inclined to believe this is a problem with the motherboard or BIOS.
Is there any sort of setting on the board that would cause this problem?
Best Answer
I have seen old IDE drives misbehave with jumper settings that should work. Cycle through all the possible settings on each of the drives: master/slave, master/CS, Slave/CS. Some drives have a master setting which is Master ONLY (no other drives allowed) and another jumper with master w/slave.