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1. Windows XP will only recognise my second hard-disk occasionally. Well, it will only recognise the data on it sometimes; it always acknowledges that there is a disk there. Sometimes I get a message saying that the drive is unformatted, and other times it works perfectly. Any suggestions?
2. Windows XP keeps freezing. In many ways this is worse than the BSOD, because it allows you no hope of recovery and forces you to reset. Normally I wouldn't mind to much, comes with the territory when you use MS products, but virtually every computer session is ended by this annoying problem. I've lost essays and posts on here all because, out of the blue, it decides to freeze up. Everything is frozen, you can't move the cursor or press CTRL+ALT+DEL. The whole bloody thing just stops until you manually restart.
Can anyone help? Do it for the sake of my computer, I'm on the verge of putting a fist through the monitor.
In fact, it may be a good idea to set it as master. Use the second drive as master for a while, if you don't get any burning problems, leave it. If you do, just open up the case and swap the jumper positions :-)
Your IBM drive is probably fubarred. If you really want to continue using it, see if you can convince XP not to use it as swap/v.memory space. Either that or buy a new one that isn't IBM :-)
One problem could be that XP is detecting my slave drive as C:\ and my master as F:\. I thought the drive letters were fairly arbitrary but could that be a sign of something not right?
My current set up has a cd writer and a DVD drive on the secondary bus, and a Maxtor and an IBM hard-disk on the primary bus. Everything on the secondary bus works fine, my only problem is with this damn IBM (quel surprise) drive on the primary bus... so just to confirm, what would you suggest moving where?
> Well that's what you get for buying IBM.
it was cheap! what can i say! i'm a sucker for a "bargain" :o)
> ... the upgrade I got was 133Mhz, whereas the rest is 100Mhz, but
> I was assured that the 133Mhz would just operate at 100Mhz anyway...
I was told this too but had nothing but problems. Stick to the same speed for all your DIMMs.
> 1. Windows XP will only recognise my second hard-disk occasionally.
> Well, it will only recognise the data on it sometimes; it always
> acknowledges that there is a disk there. Sometimes I get a message
> saying that the drive is unformatted, and other times it works
> perfectly. Any suggestions?
I'm uncertain if it's a similar problem, but I got a new IBM 82GB drive and then I partitioned it and it kept coming up with errors, losing data, disk not appearing, 'incorrectly formatted' messages etc. etc. especially after any sort of crash.
In the end I ran one of the disk tools things from the IBM site and it's been perfect ever since - not had a problem, only that I can't partition the drive.
I guess it might be worth checking out the drive manufacturers website.
You can have 4 IDE drives. You have two busses on one motherboard, and each can accept a master and slave device. Your HDD 1 (c:\) must be on the Primary bus, with its jumper set to Master. So, I'm guessing you have two drives left. This is what I'd do:
Attach both drives to your Secondary bus. Set the hard drive as Master and the CD-ROM drive as slave, and plug them in. Make sure your BIOS detects them. If you have two CD-ROM drives, set your secondary one as Primary Slave. This is on the basis that the Primary bus, with your master HDD on it, should have its bus pretty much to itself to let it run efficiently. Hard drives should be master wherever possible to increase performance.
However:
I would take out HDD 2 and see what happens. If it is failing, and Windows is using it as virtual memory, then you're going to get vital parts of it faulting, which leads to a high Windows mortality rate.
There is nothing that is triggering the the computer to freeze otherwise, no common event that makes it happen, sometimes I can use the computer for an hour and nothing will happen, other times I will have to restart five times in twenty minutes.
The Hard-disk is equally puzzling. It's not the cables because BIOS is detecting it, and Windows acknowledges its existence, but sometimes when I log in, it says the drive is unformatted, and other times it works normally. I'm not entirely sure why it's doing it either, as I don't make any changes that suddenly make it appear again, it just happens.
Is there a possibility I need to alter the jumper settings on the primary drive to make it aware of the secondary drive?
If that doesn't help, consider replacing your case's power supply unit.