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computer not finding hard drive?

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ares350

Member
Joined
Mar 23, 2004
my lanparty is not detecting my western digital hard drive.

I just formatted the drive (it was a slave in my old PC) and booted it up in the new one. the wires are connected right(its made for dummies, as it will only fit one way.)

but no dice.

any ideas what to look for? I have the jumpers set to master, and its in the P-IDE slot.
 
lil confused, are u just trying to move your hd from 1 comp to another?

if so make sure you go into the bios first (usually by hitting delete at start up) and make sure to auto detect your hd
 
If there's no slave drive on the channel, try taking the jumper completely off the drive. WD normally uses this configuration for master with no slave.
 
I definitly have the jumper in the master position, its labeled.

it was a slave drive, just for additional storage in the old PC. no OS. so I formatted it in windows, and then moved it over to be the primary drive in the new system.

though bios shows "none" under primary drives. windows found it and is formatting it.

shouldnt that not be possible? if bios doesnt see it, I thought it meant it wasnt hooked up right.
 
I'm surprised the OS found it. As Xaotic said, with WD, you need to have a slave drive if it is set to Master. Otherwise it should be set to Single.

This caused me some confusion when I bought my first WD. With Maxtor, you can leave the drive set to Master with or without a slave drive.
 
yup, that was the problem. pulled the jumper and it worked. kinda lame way of doing that...
 
they need dummy spots on their hard drives if you have to pull a jumper to set it as a single drive. what if i want to add a drive later and i can't find the jumper(although i really have lots of jumpers, your average user doesn't)
 
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