I have 1 hard drive, right, with the jumpers set to master, and that's fine (I'm talking to you now, aren't i?)
And I want to put a second hard drive in, so I set the jumper to slave on that one... and neither hard drive was detected when I turned the puter on.
So I tried changing the master jumper to master: force device 1 jumper... but the same problem still exists.
What should I do?

Also, for some reason my master hard drive is drive "H:", which not only bothers me immensely, but also may hold a key to solving this puzzle.

plz :(

The fact that one drive is drive H shouldnt make any difference. You can format drives to have any kind of letter you want.

Sometimes jumpers can be confusing, have you tried mirroring the way you put in the jumpers? because the instructions on the bottom or top of the hard drive can be confusing, as sometimes you cant tell which way is up.

cable might be stuffed

how old are the hard drives, or how old is your old hard drives. Doesnt happen that often, but sometimes hdd can be incompatible with each other and have to be on different cables.

Try installing the drives singulary, for example, leave the jumpers as is.

And connect the slave hdd only, make sure to see if it shows up as a slave in the BIOS, do the same for the master.

If that does indeed work, then I'd be checking the IDE header on the motherboard, IDE cable or the jumpers.

The hard drives are both under 2 months old.

I'll try mirroring the jumpers - but judging from the way it was set up to begin with, it's right...

You can format drives to have any kind of letter you want.

Without losing all my files?

if you got win2k, yes.

I beleive that you can do it with partition magic, ill see if you can do it with the built in win2k HDD manager... yep, sure can.

start->settings->control panel->admin tools->computer management->disk management->right click on drive letter you want to change, and click change driver letter and path.

f*** it one of the hard drives is broken, won't work by itself even, doesn't feel like it is spinning.

take it back, or throw it around the room.

yeah i'll take it back to umart... if i find an electromagnet powerfull enough to destroy the data on it, incase umart figures out a way to make it work

ah f*** this, i don't even feel like waking up tomorrow.. i have nothing left to do with myself if i don't have my documents...
this is so f***ed
my whole life was on that hard drive

Your obviously don't have the correct jumper settings if neither HDD is being picked up.

Put the new HDD into IDE0 as Master by itself and it should be picked up in BIOS.

If it doesn't, then something is wrong with the HDD.

In regards to h:\ or whatever. You need to understand that c:\, d:\, sex:\ or whatever, they mean nothing. They are purely how windows displays the HDD to you. Changing its letter merely changes its reference to the device which it corresponds to.

haha.

fcken get on msn teen

edit: i am mildly retarded

if the hdd really is broken, and the data on it was really important to you, than you might consider getting data recovery experts to get the data you want.

You need to understand that c:\, d:\, sex:\ or whatever, they mean nothing

except having to edit 20000 links on my computer to reflect the change of one letter :(

www.howstuffworks.com ?

To change Drive Letters under WXP / 2K
http://users.bigpond.net.au/josh/drv.jpg

omg XP has n00b magic also ...

No XP doesnt have Partition Magic. And whats so newbie about it ?

Its an awesome program.

He's one of the people who think stuff should be done via fdisk, I'd say.

PM is good because half the stuff it allows you to do cannot be done in fdisk. He just sounds like a fag trying to look like a hardc*** by not using PM.

Im not sure which version of fdisk he's using, but Ive yet to see one with the option to merge 3 NTFS partitions.

merge without formatting :D

hey budda, that doesn't work, it says you can't change drive letter of the boot volume