Older HP BIOS/New Hard Drive

[Tim Hurley]

My sister-in-law received an older (386?) HP computer as a gift. It only
had one hard drive and the IDE cable did not have an additional connector to
add a slave. I sent her one of my old drives along with a ribbon cable with
connectors for both master and slave. After installation, the computer sees
the new slave, but DOS can't see it nor can Norton Ghost ( I just wanted her
to be able to back up to the new drive).

The BIOS settings shows that the slave is not present.

How can I have her modify the BIOS so that it will detect the drive?

[Ben Myers]

First, the easiest, and perhaps the only, way to add a second hard drive is to
install an add-in 3rd party disk controller card with its own built-in disk
BIOS. If the computer really is a 386, or even a 486, you'll need to search for
an ISA bus card. These are very hard to find. You may spend more time to find
the card than the computer itself is worth.

A 386 is almost like a gift to ones worst enemy these days. If you are anywhere
near Harvard, MA, give a call, come on by and I'll sell you a working $10
Pentium system. I've been scrapping them for about $10 worth of electronic
scrap, because I can't sell them any more around here... Ben Myers

On Sat, 28 Jun 2003 06:40:34 GMT, "Tim Hurley" <tnhurley@attbi.com> wrote:
My sister-in-law received an older (386?) HP computer as a gift. It onlyhad one hard drive and the IDE cable did not have an additional connector toadd a slave. I sent her one of my old drives along with a ribbon cable withconnectors for both master and slave. After installation, the computer seesthe new slave, but DOS can't see it nor can Norton Ghost ( I just wanted herto be able to back up to the new drive).The BIOS settings shows that the slave is not present.How can I have her modify the BIOS so that it will detect the drive?

[Clark Wilhelm Griswold, Jr.]

"Tim Hurley" <tnhurley@attbi.com> wrote:
My sister-in-law received an older (386?) HP computer as a gift. It onlyhad one hard drive and the IDE cable did not have an additional connector toadd a slave. I sent her one of my old drives along with a ribbon cable withconnectors for both master and slave. After installation, the computer seesthe new slave, but DOS can't see it nor can Norton Ghost ( I just wanted herto be able to back up to the new drive).The BIOS settings shows that the slave is not present.How can I have her modify the BIOS so that it will detect the drive?

It sounds like she doesn't have the jumpers set properly. Some HPs require both
drives be set to "CS" or cable select, and a cable select cable used. Other
computers use the master/slave jumper settings and a pass through cable...