Odd story... I've taken apart some of my family's old computers and removed the HD's from them. It just so happens that I find out both of these old comps (some Packard Bell, and a shop made model) have the exact same 1.7 GB HD. I figure that it shouldn't be too hard to make these drives the slave in the new computer so that I can transfer all the old docs off of them to the new 60 GB HD. NOT SO!

The odd thing is that even though they are the exact same HD, they are behaving differently (diff problems) when they are connected as the slave drive (Primary IDE Slave). FIRST OFF, I do have all jumper settings correct (I've tried each one on cable select, and slave settings). One of them I cannot get the BIOS to recognize, it just thinks its not there even when I manually set the CYL's, Heads, etc. As I chain up the other identical HD and set it to cable select OR slave (on jumpers) my computer won't even boot. It tells me that it's a bad system disk...it's as if no matter what, it "thinks" its the master. The other bad thing is that when I put this HD back in the old computer it gives me the same bad system disk message, so it really seems I'm screwed getting the old docs off of it.

I'm running a P4 1.8 , 256 pc 2700 RAM, 60 GB IBM HD (NTFS), and a Soyo P2S Dragon Ultra Mobo.

I'm not sure on the file system of these old HD's...they were formatted under Win 95. Here's a link to what exactly these old HD's are

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/ata/st31720a.html

Anyway, I've made this too long already.

Muchas Gracias

Here is a trick that has worked for me:

1) Jumper the drive as master.

2) Unplug the ribbon cable from the CD-ROM (Usually the master to IDE channel 2)

3)Remove the power cable from the CD ROM

4) Attach the ribbon & pwer cabled from 2&3 to new drive.

5) Boot up & set bios.

6) Transfer docs.

7) Reverse steps 4,3,2.

8) Have a nice day

Ive had to do what Classic explained above numerous times..and if you conenct ither "old" drive as Master using the second IDE that the CDROM was using and still find that the bios will not detect it..shutdown and take the jumper out completly and try that. Some drives ive seen alone on one IDE wont detect in bios if its set as Master..only till there is a slave also on that IDE did it need to be jumpered as Master.

Thx for the input! That should work i agree. However, I just tried it and its a no go. Now that really baffles me. Maybe I should try a different comp with a different mobo...although I doubt it will make much difference. I'll keep ya posted :(

This might not help you but I remember on the old harddive we had to run the disk manager which would transform the the spec of larger drive(1.7 gig was a large harddrive on those days) to something readable to the bios. Once you ran the disk manager, the traslated spec would not work on any other computers. I am not sure but most of those drives used "???Trackit???" disk manager which came with the darddrive.