First, I'd check the IDE cables one more time and make sure nothing is
reversed (stripe goes toward the power connector end), the same with the
floppy drive. Then I'd swap the IDE cables between the CD drives and the
hard drives on the mother board and see if the problem stays with the IDE
port on the motherboard or goes with the drives.  If the problem stays with
the drives, then double check the drive jumper settings (maybe leave the
primary master jumper off, I've had that work).

If the problem stays with the IDE port on the system board (transfers to the
CD drives) then your board could be going bad.


----- Original Message -----
From: "bc" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, July 04, 2002 12:01 PM
Subject: Drives showing up in Fdisk and Windows as Unformatted


> Recently I am having problems w my floppy drive and all of my hard drives
> when configured as Primary slave.My primary master/ boot drive C has no
> apparent problems.
> I no longer have access to the A:\. I have swapped it out for a known good
> one but still it doesn't recognized ANY floppies as formatted.
> My Primary Slave drive is also showing up as unformatted as well.
> I have a Master Slave setup on the 2nd IDE channel for 52x cdrom/24x CDR
> burner and so far no issues with these. It only seems to be affecting my
> physical hard drives and floppy drives.
> I have the latest virus definitions of Norton AV
> and no viruses are being found.
> I can take any physical hard drive out of this system that are being
> detected as unformatted and put into another system and all partitions
> etc.... are recognized in fdisk, and in Windows.
> However, in this system I have no way to get into fdisk except by booting
> directly into the command prompt via f8 then pathing it to the
> windows/command/fdisk. No partitions are being recognized in fdisk,or
> windows for the primary slave drive even though I know they are there. The
> only thing I haven't tried yet is to change the position of the primary
> slave to master 2nd. Because I am having the same issue with the A:\ I
don't
> think this will resolve anything.
> This indicates to me that I have either the bios chip going bad/ dying or
> something in the IDE bus channels are failing.
> When I boot using the C:\ into windows it is rock solid. No crashes,etc...
> When I try to add any new drives etc.... no recognition as a formatted
hard
> drive.
> Any knowledgeable techs chime in.
>
> Please Advise
>
> Barry Clark
> MCSE
>
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