LBA IDE Drives

[Dustygee123]

I'm running a Windows 7 system, with 2 80G IDE hard drives. No matter which one I use as the master, the slave only shows up as 32G ... If I switch them, they flip/flop the sizes ... Looking at my CMOS, it shows them both as LBA, but the secondary shows a max capacity of 32G???? Is this a limitation of the CMOS, or is this just an IDE quirk? ... I would really like to be able to 'shadow' my hard drive, but I'm stuck ... any suggestions?

 

[Paperdoc]

It appears your system is having trouble detecting correctly the parameters for the Slave unit. Is the BIOS set to detect the size automatically? If it is and it's still having this trouble, look elsewhere in the BIOS Setup screens for a place where you can tell it to detect the HDD sizes for you and let you confirm the proper settings. Usually if you do that you can choose one set of parameters for the HDD manually from a list. In your case, I'm guessing the two HDD's should have almost the same parameters. In fact, if you connect them one way and do this, you should get the correct parameters for the Master unit. Then shut down, switch the drives, and repeat, getting new parameters for the OTHER HDD that is now the Master. Then you should be able to enter these in the BIOS Setup main screen, instead of letting it detect automatically.

Just in case you're having trouble with jumpers, here's a quick review. Use the diagrams on each HDD's case to set its jumper - some are different from others, so don't assume they will be the same. Set one to Master, OR to Master with Slave Present, if that it a different option. Set the other to Slave. When connecting, plug the Master unit into the END of the 80-conductor cable, and the Slave unit to the centre one.

 

[Dustygee123]

Thank you for the reply. I have done some more research, and the problem appears to be that I have a Sony Vaio ... and the BIOS will only recognize a maximum 137GB total, and it is an older model, so there doesn't appear to be any updates or patches for this BIOS, so it appears I may just be out of luck.

On the brighter side, this way I can just flip the jumpers and drives, and go from an 80GB Windows 7 system back to my 80GB Windows XP system, without too much hassle ... (sigh).

 

[Paperdoc]

You got the details wrong. The 137 GB limit (because your older BIOS lacks an updated feature called "48-bit LBA Support") is applied to EACH HDD separately. So your machine should not have any problem with two 80 GB HDD's. There is something else wrong here.

One further idea: how may IDE ports does your machine have on the mobo? Many of that age had two. While you may be using the first one (probably labelled IDE0), you could plug your 80-conductor data ribbon cable into the other one. It is not necessary to use the first one first. Maybe there is a problem with the port you are using. Or maybe your cable actually has a flaw.

 

[IvanM666]

Olha, um dos casos, com IDEs ou SATAs, pode haver um jumper na parte trazeira, com 2 IDEs ligados no Bicabo, Plugue azul(cor#) ou do meio você poem o master geralmente e o preto(ponta) você define como "Slave" ou outros "CS" "PM2" etc.
Com o SATA não tem muito erro, apenas por um em cada porta, mas pode definir, porém estude um pouco o caso.
Pode resolver, senão eh como foi informado sobre a BIOS e não vais querer atualizar BIOS, trabalho pesquisando e corre risco ferrar a BIOS com arquivos não correspondentes por um mero componente, etc.