I am having problem with two hard drives, the drive i had insatalled OS is not shown in boot priority. What should ido?

[Maheswaran_1]

I had recently added a WD 320 gb sata hard drive into my pc. i have an AMI bios. In my bios my WD hard drive is not shown in the boot priority, also it shows my old drive(which had formated and have the system reserved folder only) is shown as boot device. Also My empty harddrive is shown as secondary master and my WD drive which contain the win& os is shown as slave. i tried to remove the empty hard disk. but system wont start.

 

[Saga Lout]

The answer might be in the BIOS. Check to see if there's an entry for IDE, change it to AHCI or SATA.

 

[Shaun o]

By the sound of it you are using old hard drives in the system that Use Ide ribbon cables. Sata does not denote if a drive is a master or slave device as only one drive can be connected to a sata cable.

Primary and slave were used when using a IDE type connection data cable.

For each Ide cable there are two data connection points to connect an Ide hard disk drive.

The black colored connection block denotes that a master device must be connected to it.
And the gray block is where you should connect a slave device.

On the back of each IDE hard disk drive you will see a small plastic bridge pin connector.
On the top face of the drive it`s self it will show the bridge pin and the position it must be set to for.

A master device, Slave device, or cable select mode.

If the jumper is set to master the drive must be connected to the black Ide connector block as said.
And the Gray Ide connector block if the jumper is set to slave.

You cannot have two IDE hard drives on the same cable set to both Master devices, or slave devices at the same time.

You must change the jumper on one drive to a slave device, connect to the gray block of the Ide cable.
And the other drive must be set via the jumper to Master device, and connected to the black block of the Ide cable.

Set the WD drive that has the windows os on it, to a master device via the jumper and connect it to the black connector block of the ide cable. Connected to IDE port 0 of the motherboard.

And the drive you wish to use for storage to a slave device via the jumper. and connect it to the gray IDE block of IDE cable connected to IDE port 0 of the motherboard.

IDE port 0 primary
Black is always a Primary master drive.
Gray is always a Primary slave drive

IDE port 1 secondary.
Black is always a secondary master drive.
Gray is always a secondary slave drive

Once done in the boot order of the bios set the primary master device to number 1 in the boot order list.

And it should boot windows.
All of the hard drives should be detected if you have three drives.
And a cd or DVD rom drive if you also have one connected via the secondary IDE port 1 set as a secondary master, or slave device.