Master/Slave on a Dell Dimension

raynorayno
edited September 2006 in Hardware
I have a laptop that died and I'm trying to recover the data from it. So...I bought a 44/40 pin cable adapter so that I could attach the drive as a slave on my Dell Dimension 2400.

The drive shipped with the Dell 2400 is a Hitachi and there is a cable from the motherboard to it. There is a second cable coming out of the motherboard, which is what I plugged the laptop hard drive into via the cable adapter.

The jumpers on the Hard Drive that came with the Dell Dimension are set to Cable Select (according to Hitachi's site). I set the jumper on the laptop hard drive to slave and then tried setting them to cable select and both times, I booted up and got the same result...a message appears :
"Primary Hard Drive 1 Not Found"

So, I went into the BIOS and changed the slave drive from AUTO to OFF and although Windows XP Boot straight through with no error messages, it's not recognizing the laptop drive.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Comments

  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2006
    Have you tried it with each drive on a separate IDE Channel? Some laptop drives are designed with the idea that they'll only ever be the lone drive on its channel to begin with. Try hooking it up where the cdrom or DVD drive is, with the original hard drive in the desktop machine hooked up as usual on the other channel.
  • raynorayno
    edited August 2006
    profdlp wrote:
    Have you tried it with each drive on a separate IDE Channel? Some laptop drives are designed with the idea that they'll only ever be the lone drive on its channel to begin with. Try hooking it up where the cdrom or DVD drive is, with the original hard drive in the desktop machine hooked up as usual on the other channel.
    Well...the cable that connects to the hard drive that came with the dell is marked drive 0. There is another cable that connects to the DVD/CD...that's the cable that my laptop drive is on. That cable has two plugs on it, and is labeled Drive 0...Drive 1. I moved the hard disk that came with the Dell onto it and plugged it into the Drive 0 plug while leaving the laptop drive plugged into Drive 1...still no luck.

    Could it be that the laptop drive has gone bad and that's why it's not getting recognized? Or do you think this is just a jumper setting?

    Thanks
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2006
    rayno wrote:
    Well...the cable that connects to the hard drive that came with the dell is marked drive 0. There is another cable that connects to the DVD/CD...that's the cable that my laptop drive is on. That cable has two plugs on it, and is labeled Drive 0...Drive 1. I moved the hard disk that came with the Dell onto it and plugged it into the Drive 0 plug while leaving the laptop drive plugged into Drive 1...still no luck.
    The connector at the end is for the Master drive, with the middle one for the Slave drive. (The other end obviously goes to the motherboard.)
    Could it be that the laptop drive has gone bad and that's why it's not getting recognized? Or do you think this is just a jumper setting?
    A dead drive would certainly cause the problem. Do you hear the drive spinning at all?

    As for the jumper, what is the brand and exact model# of the troublesome drive? I'll see if there is any information that might be helpful. :)
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited August 2006
    Could it be that the laptop drive has gone bad and that's why it's not getting recognized? Or do you think this is just a jumper setting?
    You didn't forget to connect a power cable to the drive, did you?
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited September 2006
    Leonardo wrote:
    You didn't forget to connect a power cable to the drive, did you?

    Most, if not all laptop HDDs get their power through the IDE connector. :)
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