problems installing hard drive

[clemerson]

Hey,

I've got an old computer that has a lot of music on it, it is used mainly as a jukebox. I got tired of booting it up just to listen to music, so I thought I'd just move the hard drive into my new(er) computer. After I connected it up and everything in the new computer, I tried to boot up. Linux Mint won't boot up at all, and Windows XP (on the same, newer hard drive) boots up quite slowly but then performs fine. I disconnected the drive I installed, and now am in Mint, but without my music files...

In case this is confusing, here's how it's set up:
- sda is the drive that came in my newer computer, it is a SATA drive with a Swap partition, an ext3 partition for linux mint, an ntfs partition for Windows XP, and a fat32 XP recovery partition.
- hdb is the drive from my older computer (that is now disconnected). It's an IDE drive with DSL installed on an ext2 partition. This is where all the music is! It also has a small swap partition.
- the ribbon cable in my computer has two plugs, a "master" plug and a "slave" plug. The "master" plug is plugged in to the optical (CD) drive and that drive's jumpers are set to Cable Select. (I have tried setting it to Master, with no luck). The "slave" plug is (was) plugged into drive hdb with the jumpers on that drive set to Cable Select (again, I've tried with Slave, but no luck).
- I haven't touched the sda drive. Booting into a Puppy live CD worked just fine, and it was able to detect and mount each drive. Windows also was able to detect the hdb drive, but obviously it couldn't read it because of the ext2 filesystem.

Sorry it's kind of a long post, I tried to include lots of details. If anyone has made it this far, do you have any ideas? Let me know if I should clarify anything or check anything else.

Thanks!

[Husse]

This is akin t some problems we've had with mixed IDE and SATA
Here's a link to an explanation
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... annot_boot
That is not your problem but you need to know about it just in case
If you can put the IDE disk and the CD player on separate cables
If this is not possible

the ribbon cable in my computer has two plugs, a "master" plug and a "slave" plug

Use another cable because if this is really true the cable is a special one only to be used with special equipment - the IDE controller must be built to use cable select
Get yourself a normal cable
Remember the long section of the ribbon cable nearest the motherboard
Put the hard disk at the far end and set it as Master (avoid having a hdd as anything but master)
Put the CD in the other connector as slave
Check BIOS for bootsequence and use UUID as described in the link above - you're good to go
PS Cable select is some crap that only a few computer manufacturers, notably Compaq, has used

[clemerson]

Thanks. The wiki link is helpful too, I missed it when I was searching. I do indeed have a Compaq. I'll try your suggestions, but I'm not sure if it's so big a deal to me as to go get a new cable.

Thanks again for your help.

Edit - thanks again! Worked perfectly for Mint. I still have issues with Windows XP - it's taking a few minutes to boot up - but this is a Mint forum... I have a friend who may be able to help me on the Windows side.