I just put my new motherboard in my computer. i hooked up everything as normal from the old one. i put the blue IDE ribbon that runs the cd drives into the IDE1 primary slot colored blue. I put the black IDE ribbon into the IDE2 secondary slot. i booted up the computer and it started well. it went into the bios part recognized everything except the media failed. it detected the disk drive and cd drives but not the hard drives. it got to the point where it would load windows and restarted itself and did this over and over. i believe due to the fact it doesnt see the hard drives there. i reset the cable and still nothing. any idea? im looking to buy a new cable but i doubt it will work.

Are your hard drives SATA drives? If not, it would appear you have all connected wrong.

what is connected to ide2?

Originally posted by ddp:

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what is connected to ide2?

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The way he described it, it looks like his hard drive(s) is/are, unless he has SATA drives.

ide2 has my hard drives. i did put the hard drives(with the black colored cable) to ide1 primary(the blue colored slot) and it still didnt work. i dont have sata drives.

what are the hd's jumpered as as in master, slave or cable select because it sounds like both are master or slave but not both?

lol im not that new, but one is master nd one is slave. connected accordingly to the ide cable

try 1 drive at a time to see which is seen & what postion as master or slave. try another ide cable. is that a dell pc?

hp. ill try one at a time. gotta go to stor tom. to get a new cable.

so yea the new cable didnt work either.

try changing the boot priority in the bios so it boots from the other hard drive.

try changing all the jumpers to the 'cable select' setting... it might help

it doesnt matter what the sequence is. i plug the ide cable in the mobo and it doesnt recognize any of the hard drives.

what does the cable select option do.

i just moved it from one mobo to the other. it should read onthe new one like it did on the old one.

It uses the cable connection order in order to set Master and Slave... Your standard cable has 3 connectors, one goes to your mobo and the other two are your drive connnections. The one all the way at the other end is the Master one and the other is the Slave one... If you have the wrong jumper setting on the drive and cable, its not going to work properly. I always use cable select for that reason as it takes all the 'guess work' out of it...

Try it. See if it works.

ok so i put the new cable in and it recognizes my hard drives. windows wont boot. i have the same hardware just on a different motherboard. could i need to repair windows to get it to read my hard drive.

you probably need to reinstall windows, since you changed motherboards.

cee43ja1 is right... When yoy installed the new mobo, it changes the drivers windows installs so it can boot correctly. The drivers are not PnP and are done upon installation. So your only true option is a reinstall...

hmm ok thanks for the help. ill get right on that. of course mycomputer didnt come with an xp cd. its on the hard drive