Richard, if I understand your problem correctly, I think you just need to rearrange and re-seat the cables and make sure the BIOS sees the drives correctly before boot up.

Set the hard drive to be master on the IDE Primary port.  Set the CDRW to be master on the secondary IDE, with the CDRom as slave on the same port.

If the hard drive is a recent make, use an 80 wire ribbon to connect it.

Standard 40 wire cables will do for the two CD's.  And enable DMA for all drives if it's available in Device Manager.  If it doesn't work, you'll know about it and you can reset it.

Don't fuss with cable select - set all the drives as master or slave.

And don't do anything while the computer is running, of course. 

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
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The NOSPIN Group
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  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Richard Hallett 
  Subject: [PCBUILD] partitions lost


  New Maxtor 40 G drive 6E040L0510623

  Originally partitioned  into 4partitions I believe it called  mode 6  ATA
  133 with the Max Blast 3 cd..  Forgotten whether as Mastor or Cable Select
  my bad membory says Cable Select

  I was getting ready to make a CD but remembering that I had read that the CD
  write should be on the end of the cd cable I reversed the reader and writer.
  I think at the same time I dislodged the end of the secondary cable driving
  them slightly. I believe both cdroms were set in the original Master
  position

  On bootup the machine said put in the boot disk. That was the end of that.
  Now the harddrive is not recognized and the bios sees it as a reference
  number and un partitioned and looks for ATA 100.

  I don't know really what is missing other than the machine does not
  recognize the partitions.  The standard f disk boot disk says there are no
  partitions unless they were put in there by some other program.

  I am still chasing to see what is available on the Maxblast 3 cd.

  Suggestions??.

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