ide cable problem

[chamaco9]

i was wondering if its possible for the part of the ide cable to work for the master (the one at the end) and not the one for the slave(the one in the middle). i installed a slave hard drive and it says it doesnt detect a secondary hard drive. and its not the power because i switched around the power cables (because i have to, one for the master and slave) and its not that. should i buy another ide cable?

i previously installed this slave hard drive but what turned out happening was that i had to reinstall windows 98 on my computer( its an NEC) because this computer was missing a lot of files...it worked fine with it and now i cant reinstall it? what should i do?
thanks for any help you can give

[jmorrell]

It's not likely the IDE cable is faulty. Before investing in a new IDE cable, try checking the jumper settings on both hard drives. If one or the other is set wrong, the secondary won't be detected. It's easy to get this wrong, especially if you have two different brands of hard drives. Make sure your primary (boot) drive is set to Master and the secondary is set to Slave. If that still doesn't work, you may have a cable problem.

[grunt]

Also some drives just don't liked to be paired up on a single chain. You may try slaving it to your cdrom also.