Second hard drive not recognised

My first hard drive was failing on booting - going to a black screen with an error message - so I have purchased and installed a second hard drive. The new hard drive is in Sata0 and the old hard drive is in Sata1. The old hard drive was disconnected, basically because I did not have a second data cable, whilst I reloaded every thing on to the new hard drive. Obviously I am trying to access data on the old hard drive. When I conected the old hard drive to the motherboard using a data cable it was not recognised, but on reading several threads I realised I needed to enable the drive in the Bois. My problem is that having done this the computer hangs to a black screen, almost as if it is booting from the old drive, but without the error message. I had assumed that the computer would boot from Sata0, I am sure I read that somewhere, but I also saw a thread on this board which I think implied Sata1. Is there anyone who can help? Colin

Hello Colin; I hate to assume anything when trying to help ppl with computer problems, so forgive me if you have done some of this already. Lets start this from the top. When you installed the second hd, did you set the jumpers correctly? You should have one HD set as master and the other set as slave. Most IDE cables will allow for 2 harddrives to be attached, although I have seen a few that did not. One should always be set as master while the other set as slave to be able to access both. These jumper settings will primaraly determine which HD is accessed as the drive to boot from, and which will be the extra data storage disk. A normaly safe setting in the BIOS is to auto detect the hard drives, I would set auto detect for each drive, and let the comptuer figure out from there the very best settings to use. It is safest. You did not mention which OS you were useing, but for this basic stuff, as mentioned above, its not nessisary for me to know that, as of yet. Do you know the exact error message you were getting ? This can help to determine what failed and why, and we may be able to figure out how to fix that issue. WOLFGAR :hat: ( i sure hope that one of the mods of these forums finnaly relise that im typing :hat: in hopes that they get that smiley for me :-)

Thanks for the reply. Both drives are Sata drives, not IDE drives. I did not think the position of the jumpers mattered in this case. I don't think the BOIS gave the option for auto detect - I think the option was either on or off. The operating system is Windows XP. I have a Dell Dimension XPS Gen3. It uses RAID(?), which I don't understand, and possibly I need to change something there. I can't rememer the error message. I am not at home at the moment, but I will try and look it up later. I ran the Dell Diagnostic Program and spoke to Dell. They said the error code was not conclusive and that I would have to reformat the drive to find out if it was a hardware problem. That was when I decided to try and access it via another hard drive. Regards Colin

My daugter, who emailed the problem to Dell for me, has just sent the original email back to me: Dell diagnostic programme shows error 0S00:0244 and 1A44 for blocks 33993829 and 82363016. Message reads uncorrectable data error or media is right protected. I am unable to access safe mode. Regards Colin