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Hi all,
I have three hard drives in my system. I would use Norton Ghost to back up (clone) so my system would never be more than 2 weeks old. This worked well using current master drive and connecting the slave ribbon to the other drive and coping the master current drive to slave then I would unplugg the slave ribbon from the copied slave drive and connect the master ribbon to the copied slave drive and all my info would be there and current. The problem occurred when I noticed a problem with my os and fromatted one of the drives and did a clean install now my other two drives are not recognized either as slave or master. What happened?
BTW my os system is XP Home.

Hey DD1, were you using XP Home before the format?

Also, try using a different IDE cable in case it may be damaged due to wear and tear.

Thanks Madmonkey. No I had used XP Pro on all drives before. I don't know if I have another IDE cable, I will look. I assumed it must be good since it is doing fine with the drive I completely redone but it is just the other two that the machine does not recognize in slave or master. I assumed it was something with changing the os on the current drive but I don't know how to fix it.

ek, can you see the drives in BIOS?

no. It is set at Auto

DD, do you see the drives being picked up during post? Another way to check is to go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management followed by Disk Management.

Your problem could lye in two places.

1) Either the drive is not being picked up during startup, in which case we will need to make sure there are not hardware problems. IDE Cable and make sure the very top of the IDE cable is plugged into the HDD set as master, and the plug inbetween set as slave.

2) Another problem is that you may not be able to read the drives if they have been formatted through XP Pro. XP Pro uses NTFS a little differently from XP Home, which is why you can upgrade your PC from XP Home to XP Pro, but not from XP Pro to XP Home without installing from scratch. I'm pritty sure that the same applies to any additional HDD's formatted with this file system.

Thanks, sorry but I had to quit on this till later tonight since my grandaughter is staying over. I have one good drive...the one that I did a complete install on. The other 2 I tried to clone but as the system comes up it sees none as master or slave depending on the way the ribbon is hooked up.It never goes into windows because it doesn't recognize a drive.