BIOS Detects 80 Gig Hard Drive, but OS Won't Load From Drive. Solutions?
attempted to slave 500 MB HDD to 80 GB HDD. the jumper on the 500 MB was set to "master", and the computer loaded win95 from the 500 MB instead of winME from the 80 GB drive (which was set to "cable select"). Win95 didn’t detect a second HDD. Shut down and removed 500 MB drive. BIOS still detects 80 gig dive, but claims "operating system not found". Tried loading live CD of Xubuntu (which worked before all this) successfully, but Xubuntu didn’t detect any hard drives. Tried many configurations of jumpers and slaves and masters, but will still only load win95 and/or detect (but not load) the 80 GB Drive. Any troubleshooing ideas?
Well here’s the problem with what you did at first:
"ttempted to slave 500 MB HDD to 80 GB HDD. the jumper on the 500 MB was set to "master", and the computer loaded win95 from the 500 MB instead of winME from the 80 GB drive (which was set to "cable select"). Win95 didn’t detect a second HDD."
When you had the 80GB Hard Drive on cable select it sets itself to Master or Slave depending on it’s position on the IDE ribbon. |=====|===| is what a typical IDE ribbon cable looks like. Having the 80GB |=====|===| (here) sets it as master, while having it |=====|(here)===| will set it as slave. But you did something that completely ruined how cable select works. You set your 500MB hard drive to master. Cable select will also default the hard drive to the oposite of another hard drive’s jumper settings. For example, if one hard drive is set to master, cable select will set the hard drive it controls to slave, or if one hard drive is set to slave, cable select will set the hard drive it controls to master. But having a slave hard drive |=====|===|(here) confuses your IDE controller chip and it’s not a good thing to do. What you should do is set the 500MB to cable select also and set up your IDE ribbon like this (computer)|=====|(500MB)===|(80GB).
The "operating system not found" error means that your 80GB lacks a master boot record. You can fix this by loading the windows setup CD in your cdrom, letting it load to where it asks you to press enter to continue setup or press R to enter recovery mode, press R to enter recovery mode, login to the windows that the recovery mode finds, and typing "fixmbr" to put a new MBR on that hard drive and then restart your computer.
Ubuntu can’t find the hard drive because it’s not properly formatted. Have you used the hard drive before? It really sounds like you should reload windows on the 80GB or load Unbuntu, whichever you perfer. If this is a brand new hard drive, straight out the box, then what I said about fixing your master boot record won’t work (because it never had a master boot record in the first place).
So try fixing the MBR of the hard drive if it does indeed have a version of windows on it. If it’s brand new out of the box, it just needs to be partitioned and formatted (two things they don’t do at the factory) and both of those can be done by the setup program of your favorite OS.
I think that you need a way to choose which O.S. to use you can try this and see if it meets your needs.
http://www.osloader.com/
When using 2 hard drives, one has to be configured "Master" while the other has to be "Slave".
Set your 80GB for master and your smaller drive for slave.
In your BIOS (if it is old enough) make sure the slave drive is enabled.
Good luck.