Hello, James.
-=> on 03-19-05 15:22, JAMES BRADLEY wrote to MARTIN ATKINS <=-

 JB> Who here remembers the origin of this thread?

Oops!  I'm the guilty party.

 JB> You'll never guess, but I formated my C: partition this morning, was
 JB> shoving W98FE into it, and when it went to the reboot... NO FRIGGIN'
 JB> DRIVE! The same seemed to have happen to my master on the same bus, so
 JB> I'm suspecting: A) Controller is being funky. (Possible.) B) MBR
 JB> getting messed up. (I guess so.) C) W98 is releasing a time bomb. (Even
 JB> I don't think so.) D) A Trojan got through two years ago.

No firm answer from here, just a few thoughts - -

You FDISKed the slave and made its primary partition "Active?"
When it went to reboot, which drive would the system try to reboot?
I've never tried just what you describe, but seems that having two
drives with two active partitions on a single IDE channel might cause
problems on reboot, if that's what you did.  Unless you are set up and
jumpered for Cable Select, have you also made sure that the slave drive
is jumpered for slave? YMMV.

Just to mention, In some recent drive-swapping here, after clearing out
SETUP and attemting to have the onboard BIOS Autodetect the reattached
drives, it generally has been taking more than one attempt to correctly
autodetect the attached drives.  I haven't found any pattern to that,
but know for sure that it sometimes happens.

Have you tried disconnecting the slave and seeing if it will autodetect
your original drive?  Did you try autodetecting the drives, one at a
time, on your secondary IDE channel?

 JB> What I'm suspecting right now, is A) Controller/Cable issues. The BIOS
 JB> doesn't even see them, so how could it be anything but?

Sounds about right.  I have had an IDE channel just up and die before,
but seems like a big coincidence here.  In some recent drive swapping
here, I have had ribbon cables unplug themselves while I was rooting
around inside the case.  In past, I've also caused probs for myself by
the way I unplug the ribbon cables - generally pulling on the cable
itself in order to unplug the thing - - I've actually pulled a cable
connection apart before.

 JB> The first victim is a 1.something G Seagate, and this slave
 JB> drive is a 8.4 G Bigfoot. (Seagate too?)

Bigfoot was a Quantum tradename.  I haven't heard a lot of good things
about that line, but seems unlikely the drive would die and take out its
neighbor, all at the same time as trying to instal Winders.

One bright spot about your situation - - at least you aren't having to
deal with Linux and an add-on controller card all at the same time.

Anyway, good luck with it, and I'd like to hear what you finally figure
out.

- - -  JimH.

... "I'll give up the CLI when they pry it from my cold, dead hands."-Bubba
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