[Dr. Metal]

I got a hard drive off of a friend because he said he was having problems with it. I put it on my computer as a slave drive. When I started it up it did not reconize that hard drive or my other hard drive and said there was no operating system. Also the hard drive light stays on all the time with that hard drive in there. Any idea if we can make this drive work?

[~Spider~]

Make sure you have the jumpers set in the right position. Check the manufacture home page for the proper settings. Chances are if the light comes on and it's not making any funny noises, you might get it to work. You might want to try it as master and no slave.

[Dr. Metal]

Jumper Settings are correct. It still dosent come up as master.

[RRCinci]

It depends on the drives you have...some require that you set the master as "Master with Slave" and the other as Slave. If you don't want to change your main drive...pull the cable off your CD and hook the drive up there...set it as Master according to the specs for your drive and see if it's seen then.

Give us the drive manufacture and model number and we'll give you the proper settings so that you're sure to have it right.

Good Luck!

Paul

[Dr. Metal]

The settings on my main drive is at master and the other hard drive is at slave. I did try that hard drive by itself and it still said no OS and the hard drive light just stays on solid. it dosent detect it what so ever. it is a Seagate Barracuda ATA IV Model # ST330011A. The jumper settings should be correct because they are printed on the hard drive.

[RRCinci]

Then you're NOT gonna like the answer!!<G> Sounds like the drive has "gone south"! If there is data you REALLY need to recover from the drive...there are places that can do it. The catch...it's VERY expensive!! One place I know of charges $600 plus a per meg charge...can be outrageously expensive...unless you have only copy of your life's work on it and no backups!!<G>

Paul

[Dr. Metal]

I thought the drive might be going but I was just looking for idea's to try to get it going.

[OsirisX]

How long has your friend have the hd? And has it been damaged in anyway?

[Ordinateur Beastie]

HOLD IT!!! No one here is going to believe this-but if its a matter of the disk going bad and not simply incorrect installation-you could try putting the disk into the freezer (but in a plastic bag, also). No kidding. I advised someone to do this before (this person works at UCLA, in fact), and believe it or not, after a while in the freezer, the purportedly "dead" drive purred back to life. The user was able to boot from it and recover all data. So far as I know the drive still hasn't truly died yet. (if you don't believe me, check PC world's site).

Note: Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like the problem with this drive is physical, and freezing the drive only fixes physical glitches. Still, if all else fails, its worth a shot.

Note #2: also try the drive in other computers. Yours may just not like it.

[Dr. Metal]

It dosent look to be damaged in any way. I have tried the drive in differnt computers already. thats why my friend gave it to me to try in mine. If you can give me a link to that freezer idea cuz that sounds pretty crazy.