Extra HD-in-a-drawer question

[Gary Kleiner]

Go to your tool tray on the bottom right of your screen and click on Safely Remove Hardware. See if the missing drive is listed, and if so, remove it.

Gary Kleiner

[Peter Wright]

Another possible cause – that EIDE channel may be slave on one PV master on the other, so the jumper setting may conflict?

Peter Wright
Perth, Western Oz
http://www.allroundvision.com.au

[John Gregoriades]

Thank you, I wish I knew more about this tech. In fact, the jumpers are on the HDs, but the problem is when there is NO hard drive in the drawer(When the bay is empty.) When any of the extra HDs are in the drawer, in the bay, there are no conflicts, no problems!
The matching receptacles which are pre-fitted to the bays of the two PCs, and which receive the drawers with the HDs inside them, do not have jumpers. It must be some configuration of the PCs which is different, I figure.
When the same drawers (containing the same HDs) are inserted on the other PC, no problems, but also the other PC has no problems and works fine even when that bay is empty!
Totally beyond my tech knowledge!
But I appreciate the help and suggestions!
John

[Laszlo Kovacs]

Could you please tell, what the bluescreen exactly says?

For e.g. Stop… incaccessible boot device

or??

By(t)e
Laca

[Peter Wright]

Yes, I don’t know about empty bays. I have several drawers but always have a drive in them.

Peter Wright
Perth, Western Oz
http://www.allroundvision.com.au

[Stephen Mann]

It’s your BIOS. Make sure the removable drive isn’t in your boot drive list. Also, when the drive is in thr tray, go to your control panel, hardware, right click on the drive and see if you can select “removable”.

Steve

[John Gregoriades]

Thank you, Laszlo.
The exact boot sequence (with the drawer empty) shows the startup, which then provides a black screen, with: Strike F1 key to Reboot, F2 for setup Utility. Striking the F1 does nothing except repeat the two choices above. Striking the F2 key brings up a DOS type screen, presumably the BIOS screen, because it says so on the top right. This identifies a Primary Drive 0; a Primary Drive 1; a Secondary Drive 0; and a Secondary Drive 1. Opposite each it reads “Unknown Device.” Doesn’t seem one can proceed further.
John

[John Gregoriades]

Thank you, Steve.
I tried, with a HD in a drawer installed, to go Control panel/system/Hardware/Device Manager/disk drives/ selected the “drive in a drawer”. But could find no way to change it, no option to select “removable,” other than enable-disable it.
John

[Laszlo Kovacs]

Hi,

All I write below is “as far as I know”.
If I make a mistake, please correct me.

What is happening is that your BIOS is set up
so that it thinks there’s a drive on that place.
Since the bay is empty, the drive is not there.
Bios looks for that drive, and does not find, so it
considers this to be an error, and stops.

BIOS’s funtcion is to start the boot only:
Bios loads master boot record from the booting drive
(almost always drive C – better say dirve $80)
when the master boot record is loaded, it is executed.
MBR looks for an active (also known as bootable) partition, and when finds any, loads it’s boot record, then executes it.

The partition’s boot record is placed there by the installed
os, assuming it is XP, or w2k, the bootrecords code looks for ntdetect, loads it then executes. Ntdetect will load and execute ntldr.exe.

Ntldr starts to load the os, after that point BIOS is not
needed anymore, since NT based systems (all NT versions, W2k, and XP) does not need bios functions to handle drives, they have their own drivers.

So, enter BIOS setup, and setup so that there’s only one drive, the one your machine boots from.
All other drive can be -none- or -not installed-.
These devices will be detected by OS, independent of the settings
in BIOS setup.

Hope I could help.

Best regards

By(t)e
Laca

[Laszlo Kovacs]

Ooops.

I forgot to mention, that the bootdrive
is most probably primary master.

(Depends on how your machine is organized.)

By(t)e
Laca