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I have 2 hard disks (Western Digital Caviar 30 GB WD300) in my old computer. Both are alone on their IDE channel as master.

When I go in the BIOS, both drives are correctly showing in their respective places. In the POST I see them and SMART is reporting OK for both drives.

But when DOS show up (starting up with a Windows 95 boot disk), only C: is available. What's strange is that C: is the Secondary Master drive.

Both drives have a primary DOS partition (created them with FDISK) and were formatted using FAT32. I managed to format them by only connecting one drive at a time.

The problem is that when both drives are connected at the same time, only one shows up (always the second master one).

I tought it could be a jumper setting so I tried nearly all possibilities (master, cable select, no jumpers...). I also tried to put them both on the same channel in master slave with the same results.

Anyone have an idea what's going on?

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Dos guru needed here. – Moab Sep 13 '10 at 16:08
What do you see when you enter this command: fdisk /status? – boot13 Sep 13 '10 at 16:15
@boot13 I see both drives... #2 (Sec Master) as C: The primary master partition isn't detected by FDISK when both drives are connected. If i swap HDDs or if I only connect the PM one, the "missing" partition is shown & works. – AlexV Sep 13 '10 at 16:27

1 Answer

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It seems that the HDD was dead finally...

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