Problem installing 2nd HD in Dell Dimension 3000

[Blackboost]

Hi guys!

Once again I'm in need of help. A frind of mine just bought a brand new Dell Dimension 3000 desktop with the following specs:

P4 2.8GHz

512 DDR400 RAM

DVD-RW drive

80GB HD

He asked me to update it and change some parts for him. So I swapped the memory for 1GB Dual Channel DDR400 Corsair, added a PCI GeForce video card and round IDE cables. Then I updated the OS (to SP2) and drivers in the PC. It was working top notch until he decided to add another HD to the PC. He bought another Maxtor (exactly the same one that came with the PC) 80 GB HD. I installed and then the problems started.

Here are my observations:

1. I went to the device manager to check the transfer mode of the HD and it was set to Pio Mode only and the OEM HD was reduced from UDMA 5 to UDMA 2! Before the installation the OEM drive was working perfectly at UDMA 5.

2. I unisitalled the IDE Primary Channel to see if upon reboot both drives worked at UDMA 5. It didn't happened. I went to the registry and deleted the Master and Slave IDCheckSum entries in the respective channel and that didn't worked either.

3. I checked the BIOS and it doesn't seem to recognize the Primary Slave device. If I change it from Auto to Manual it changes to unknown device.

5. Finally I removed the IDE cable from the 2nd HD, rebooted the PC and now it recognizes the OEM HD as UDMA 5!!!

I installed every single update from Dell's site and there are no more updates to add to XP.

Am I missing something here? Any ideas guys? How come when the IDE cable is intalled in the 2nd HD, the primary HD changes to UDMA 2 and the 2nd to Pio Mode Only?

[CoffeeFiend]

Stupid question: how did you set the jumpers?

[Jonic]

You should try this :

- first try the second HDD alone (on the first IDE channel and using the cable that was on that channel) and install Windows. If you still have problems they are related to the hard disk. You should scan it with powermax (you can find it on maxtor's site).

- secondly if you didn't encounter any problems so far switch the hdd to the second IDE and see if it's something wrong with it.

- if still no problems switch cables

- if still no problems - you should try again with both hdds - and if problems start appear - it's probably mainboard related

[Blackboost]

I swapped the IDE cable for the one that was connected to the optical drives and the problem seems to have disappeared. Thanks for all the quick replies guys!