The HD just wont work!

Got tired of chasing after the old zappo drivers so i upgraded my A1200 with an ide-adaper with two 3.5 ports. I installed OS 3.1 and Idefix97 and the latest FFS and i have connected a Cdrom to one ideport and a 20GB IBM HD to the other, and i still have the old 120mb internal 2.5 HD that i have OS 3.1 on. The CDROM works like a charm.

The thing is, the HD just wont work, it doesnt show up in the HD tool box or as an icon in WB, here is what i tried so far:

Tried the HD in my PC, checked out fine.

Tried Formating it in FAT, made no difference.

Tried disconnecting the 2.5 internal HD and just running of floppys with
the 20 gb harddrive, didnt find it.

Tried installing AROS on my PC and formated the disk in AROS, didnt work.

Tried putting the HD as a master and the CD as a slave on the same cable, no use.

Ive been up all night and tried everything i could think of, do you guys have any idea what to do, im going insane over here....plz

Thanks

//Tom

[thomas]

i have connected a Cdrom to one ideport and a 20GB IBM HD to the other, and i still have the old 120mb internal 2.5 HD that i have OS 3.1 on

So by "adapter" you hopefully mean a 4way-adapter which splits the one IDE bus of the Mainboard into two identical ones.

If so, the boot HDD has to be connected to the first IDE bus of the 4way-adapter because the other bus is only enabled if the IDEfix software runs.

If you don't have a 4way-adapter you can only use two drives on the IDE bus.

In any way, on one IDE bus there can be only two drives of which one has to be master and the other one slave. Check the jumpers. If a drive is alone on the cable (in your case the CD-ROM drive on the second bus of the 4way-adapter) it has to be master.

Also the 2.5" connector on the adapter usually is shortened with one of the 3.5" connectors. So if you have a 2.5" drive connected, you can only use one other drive (which is slave) on the corresponding 3.5" connector. Read the manual carefully.

Short conclusion:

2.5" connector -> 2.5" hdd jumpered as master
first 3.5" connector -> 3.5" hdd jumpered as slave
second 3.5" connector -> CD-ROM drive jumpered as master

If you remove the 2.5" hdd, change the 3.5" hdd to master.

Hi Thomas thank you for your answer. The adapter i have looks like this: I have connected the 2.5 HD but there isnt any Jumper settings on it so i suppose it is set as master, it shows up as HD0 and HD1 in the boot menu (its partioned).
The CD is connected to the left 3.5 port and set as master, and it works. I can access it in workbench without a problem.
The 20MB IBM Deskstar HD is connected to the right 3.5 and set as slave.

When i access the workbench and i try find devices in IDEFix97 the NEC CD rom shows up, but no HD. I tried two different HD cables so its not the cable, the HD works fine on my PC. I tried just about all jumper settings on the harddrive, i even tried putting in a different HD, a 120GB Maxtor, it didnt find that either. Perhaps my problem is software related, i dont know..hope you guys can help..

//Tom

[thomas]

Try to swap the HDD and the CD-ROM. If the CD-ROM works, the HDD should work in its place either. Otherwise there is something wrong with the HDD. Does it spin up ?

I tried swapping them , the cd rom only works on the left ide port. Im begining to suspect that ive bought a broken ide adapter becouse sometimes when i boot up with just the cdrom and the 2.5 internal hd,i have to jerk the card around alittle for the computer to boot up. I tried disconnecting the adapter and running just the internal 2.5 drive alone to exclude any damage on the ideport on the motherboard, and when running only the internal 2.5 drive without the ide adapter the computer boots up fine.

The ideadapter i bought was brand new but how big is the chance that it could be a manufacturing error? Should i return the adapter and ask for a new one or is there someway to run somekind of diagnostic to find out if the adapter is ok and no ports or curcits has been damaged?