[Rand al Thor]

It's that time again, I need you boys to put your noggins together and provide my salvation. It's pretty much what it says. I bought an Internal 5.25" bay for 3.5" IDE hard drives secondhand on a irish ads site the other day, installed it with a drive I know to be working and connected the bay as the primary IDE slave.

I powered on, turned on the drive and a few seconds after logging into Windows XP Pro, I got a popup alert telling me the new hardware (not specified what hardware) had been installed and a restart was required. I thought 'fine', restarted but no sign of the drive that I have inserted in the drive bay.

It's a key activated one so when I insert the drive and turn the key to lock it in place and power it on I get a power LED and an activity LED for a few seconds then nothing but the power LED and no apparent detection in windows.

I don't know what brand this thing is but it's basically just a bay that connects to an IDE channel and then the drive case slots into this and connects through a parallel or SCSI (not sure which it is) socket.

Can anyone give me any tips or point me in the way of a solution? Do these things need drivers? I've talked to the seller but he never needed any addition software for it. He's offered a refund but I want to try and get it running first. Do the jumper settings on the HDD make any difference? Or does the bay need to be set as the primary IDE master or as the only IDE device on the channel?

Any advice welcome.
Thanks.

[DeepSpace9er]

Is this like an internal hard drive that is inserted into a computer bay like a DVD and fits into place? Is there a master/slave bridge pin in the rear that has to be adjusted accordingly? I had that problem before, i forgot to move the bridge pin on one of the drives and it refused to be detected.

[Nuke]

seems it detected the tray, but not the drive. either through a jumper placement error or the bios didnt try to autodetect it. on boot up id go into my bios and see if its detected in there. if its not detected in the bios, windows wont see it. so go to the slot for your primary slave, and look for an auto-detect feature. if that doesnt work youre gonna have to manually set the drive parameters. which can be trickey, but all the data you have to enter should be on the drive label. hopefully it wont come to that, last drive that i had that couldnt be autodetected, i was installing it on a 486. machine

as for jumper settings, its really unusual theese days to have to change it from cable select. i remember in the old days of windows 98 it mattered, but 2000/XP, it no longer requires the operating system to be on the primary partition of the primary drive. your best bet is cable select, if its the only drive on the cable it will autoselect as master, if theres another drive and its on master or slave, it will set the new one as the oppisite, if theres a cs drive already there, the new drive will select whichever channel is free without changing the other drive. you will have errors if you have 2 slaves or 2 masters. for people using drive trays i usually recomend cs.

[jr2]

Your data & power cables go straight to the 3.5" drive, right?  The 5.25" is just an enclosure, it doesn't interface with the drive, correct?

[Hippo]

make sure the IDE doesnt go into the drive upside down. I've done that with 3.5" bays before...

[jr2]

It's not supposed to be able to, as it is supposed to be keyed.  Some of the cheaper drive cables don't have the notch on one side; I've had problems with them before.    Not fun.  Hopefully your cables have the notch on the middle of one side that only allows for correct insertion.

[Descenterace]

Have you partitioned the disk yet?

Start -> Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management

Windows won't display a drive until you've created a drive on the disk.