At 09:53 PM 10/4/2002, Mike McNeil wrote:
>Hello, I was wondering if anybody could help me out with a Maxtor hard
>drive? I have currently two hard drives in my desktop pc.  The one is used
>for a master drive which is working fine.  The other is used for a slave
>drive, this is the drive that is giving me promblems.  I have ran all tests
>on the hard drive everything comes up ok.  But when I go to to boot up the
>computer it won't let me boot up with the slave drive attached.  But when I
>disconnect the slave drive the computer starts up fine.  If anybody could
>help me some advice on what to do thanks Brett...
==============================

>Check the jumper settings on the 1st Hard drive to make sure it's not set as
>a single master. You could also try changing the jumpers on both drives to
>cable select to see if that resolves the problem.
>Cheers
>Mike McNeil

I only wish you had provided more information on the Maxtor drive.
I have found recently a couple of fairly new 40gig Maxtor drives that
have something wrong in that they begin to start locking up the operating
system and over time they degrade to the point where you cannot even
completely boot the system without a lockup.  I have returned them under
warranty, as they were definitely defective.

On the issue above about "cable select," the advice is incorrect.  Cable
Select is used with a special IDE cable that 'selects' which one is the
master, similar to how a floppy drive cable works.  You use these
special cables to plug the master connector into the master drive and
the slave connector into the slave drive.  Without this cable and setting
your drives to Cable Select, you are in effect telling your system that
both are in neutral...  neither is a master or slave drive.  This is an old
option that failed in that it never caught on in popular use.

If in fact you have a setup issue on the drives, be sure that your boot
drive is set to Master and your other drive is set to slave.

    Bob Wright
The NoSpin Group, Inc.

               The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering
              Mandrake Linux or Red Hat Linux CD sets along
         with our NOSPIN Power Linux CD...  at a great price!!!
             http://freepctech.com/goodies/promotions.shtml