I recieved a Pc from my a FAMILY member which was still in good condition hardware-wise, but its software was corrupted tenfold.

To make the computer usable, I reformated it using the boot disks and finished off with my installation CD to get Xp running on it. The thing was, the computer had a slave connected to it yet in my computer, the device manager and the BIOS, the slave was listed as a floppy disk drive in drive A while my real floppy was pushed over to drive B.

To find out what was wrong, I opened my casing to find the following PCI connections

Master hdd-----------------(unused junction)-------------------pci bus card
Floppy drive-----------------(Slave hdd)--------------------------Motherboard slot

following some online instructions and a few of my tech savy mates on the web, I changed around my ribbin cables to:

Master hdd-------------------Slave hdd---------------------------Motherboard slot
Floppy------------------------(Unused junction)------------------pci bus card

note: cd and DVD cables left untouched

Now it seems my pc refuses to boot, so I reverted back to the original settings only to get the same result, a boot failure.

In the bios it says there is neither a PRIMARY master and slave, listing the slots as Uninstalled and my Hdds unlisted. If I disconnect my slave drive leaving only the master hdd which works, I boot up to a dos prompt.

Now it looks like my little adventure to get the slave working has come to a bad turn of events. Can someone tell me what's wrong?

BOARD> intel d845bg
processor> pent IV
ram> 512
hdds> Maxdor (master) western digital (slave)
(master/primary cdrom)-------(secondary/slave cdrom)-------(motherboard)

(master/primary harddrive)-------(secondary/slave harddrive)--------(motherboard)

(floppy drive)-------(possibly empty connector)-------(motherboard)


The floppy IDE cable is a little smaller than the other IDE cables