Good Afternoon,

Ok, let's say I have a fresh linux install on a new IDE HDD (hda). Now let's say I have the old IDE drive sitting around so I decide I want it to connect it to the box and mount it on /old so that I can access files and copy them over to my new freshly installed HDD. Now for some reason when ever I try to connect this second drive (I will call old hda) the machine won't boot. Errors out about stuff not found.

Is there something I need to do to get this to work? If I take a blank drive and connect it, it boots up no problem. I have tried this with a number of different drives, different IDE channels, but anytime I have an old hda connected to a machine booting a new hda it errors out.

I'm very confused. Any help you can offer would be appreciated.
(BIOS shows both drives and jumper setting are correct). Old hda -- I want to setup as a slave and then mount it.

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

You have a MBR on the old drive. You need to set the old drive to SLAVE on the jumper and set the new drive to MASTER.

Yeah that's how I had it setup still no good. Any other ideas?

Put in the old drive as master. Boot up a dos/win boot floppy. fdisk /mbr. Restore your config as before and try again.