G'day,

To all computer experts,

I have a removable drive called Super Rack that allows you to remove the HDD with ease. I use it for testing all standard HHD drives (mainly old ones) but the problem is, windows will not initiate to register som of the installed HDD in the rack I test. The rack is a UDMA 133. What am I doing that is wrong?

When installing the HDD in the rack, I remove the jumper so that the HHD is neither master or slave.

Could the UDMA 133 be the cause of the problem? Please advise to how I can fix this problem so I can use the rack.

Cheers...:)

Do the instructions state to remove the jumper? Are you successful with some drives and not others? Could Fat32 vs NTFS be causing your problems?

Is it possible these drives are encrypted?

Unless the rack itself has a jumper you should jumper it just as normal.

Is it a drive caddy with key-lock and connected to a 80 wire ribbon cable internally, in which case you must jumper according to its position on that cable,

OR

Is it a "hot-pluggable" drive caddy connected internally with USB or Firewire (and with its own built-in controller), in which case you must jumper according to mfgr. instruction (master I would guess).

I never use Cable Select. Why leave something to chance if you don't have to.

For UDMA read IDE (http://www.lsl.com.au/popup_image.php?pID=89)

Sounds too good to be true for $21.95. Is the "hot-swap" just for the USB accessories?

No, the Hot-Swap is for those who bent over backwards and forked over an additional $19.95 for tha feature. Whether it came with petroleum jelly, I'm not sure :eek:

Review here (http://www.dansdata.com/vp8058.htm)

G'day all,

The removable drive has no jumpers, just an IDE input which I use an 80 wire cable thus requires specific order of drive connection (ie black end to master drive, grey to slave). Instruction does not mention about jumper setting of original drive.

If I leave the jumpers on the drive as is then I get a system failure indicating a clash of HDDs thus had too remove jumpers.

I've set the Bios to plug and play

Paul's link shows exactly the removable drive I have.

Fat32 or not, past HDDs I was able to get into them whilst others I cannot.

Oh well, I'll just use the trial and error process to work my way through this prob.

Cheers :)

Instruction does not mention about jumper setting of original drive.

Using it

Simple IDE racks, including this one in its non-USB mode, are very easy to install. You just set the master/slave setting for the drive inside as if you were installing it un-racked,

Therefore, any internal drives attached to the same cable as the Swap enclosure falls under the same rules as if both were internally mounted.

You did not mention what brands of drives are involved here. Settings/jumpers vary between them and some prefer Cable Select where others work better with Master/Slave configurations.

And Western Digital, in single mode drive mode uses no jumpers...

G'day all,

The drives I test are years old with a max capacity of 8GB and min. of 512MB of all kinds. They are Quantum, Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital or any that I can find (for fun really). Maybe because of their oldness it could be why they might not register.

Question; Can I use command prompt to access the drive?

Cheers,

"Can I use command prompt to access the drive?"
Why not use the EBCD "File Manager" to access the drive and browse its contents?
The "File Manager" has quite a nice GUI...
You can display one drive/partition in the left pane and another in the right pane.
To browse, you double-click with the mouse cursor to open each folder to navigate down through them to the files.
You can click on a folder or file to highlight it and then carry out some [appropriate] action [copy, delete, view, edit].
You can copy something from one pane [partition/drive] to the other.

There are other [drive related] useful prog's on the EBCD.
a. "Drive Fitness Test".
b. "Aida16" [displays details of all hardware]
c. "MS Scandisk" [tests/fixes file systems on partitions]
d. "DiskEdit" [goes beneath the file system to directly view/edit the drive content]
e. "DOS 7.10 command prompt" with 32 DOS commands.