CD drives!!!!!!

OK that is the problem exclamation points after the cd drive in bios.

Now I'll start this with, I'm not a noob, its not cables, nor bios settings, and its not normal to the drive.
I have this setup where two hard drives, two burner drives. each hard drive is on its own ide channel with a burner slave. the small drive is a maxtor 20gb, it has the os on it. the big drive is a 250gb . It seems like there is a problem with the small drives jumper settings but according to maxtor, it's fine. the jumper should be on the two pins to the far left for a master drive. Is there a master with slave present pin ? If I hook any of the other three devices to this drive, I get ! ! ! ! ! after the drive name, and then the drive dosn't work.


Thanks

 

Has this configuration worked before? As you are sure that it isn't the cables, what is the jumper configuration for the burner that is slaved to this hard drive, and have you physically removed and/or checked the jumpers for both master and slave drivers on this IDE channel?

 

Yes, I've checked the jumpers to everything, I've set both sc drives to slave, both hard drives to master. I've changed out IDE cables twice. I've switched the cd drives back and forth and when either one is plugged into the master 250gb drive they come up fine, but I can't get all four to work. I don't know if this ever worked, the big drive is new it didn't come with the system.

 

Sorry that I asked obvious questions, but I've had the same issue before where two devices were set to slave or master and got the same error! How old is this machine that you're working on, and does the BIOS recognize the large drive as its full capacity?

Have you tried hooking up both hard drives to the same IDE channel with one as slave and the other as master?

 

Yes I tried putting the drives on the same channel. The same problem. The bios recognizes the whole drive. this is an asus a7n66 amd system, a few years old. As for the same error, I'm not ruleing that out. I think the small drive needs a diffrent setting, however according to maxtor, the setting is correct.