I've done two previous hard drive upgrades, one was simply adding a drive and the second was replacing my primary 12GB IBM with a 30GB one. My latest try hasn't been as smooth as the prior.

Setting the stage: I have 2 drives in my RioCar now. A 20GB and a 30GB. Both IBM Travelstars. I am replacing the 20GB drive with a Fuji 30GB I bought from another board member.

After removing the old drives entirely, I plugged in the new Fuji into the primary slot. It would not find the drive. It took me awhile to find the jumper settings (a sticker was over them) but I realized that the drive was mailed to me with the jumper set at "Cable SEL". But even after setting it to Drive 0 (master), the RioCar would not find it until I plugged it into the secondary slot on the drive cable (again, jumpered as master).

This was beginning to sound a lot like the "bad hard drive cable" problem, and it is in fact one of the RioCars. But, it is was truely a bad cable, how would one explain that the 2 IBM's work with no problem. Is it possible that the IBM's have better connectors that are less likely to be affected by the bad batch of crimped hard drive cables?

Either way, I did manage to get the disk recognized, jumpered as a master, in the secondary slot. So I installed 2.00b11 developer. Now, the FAQ lists how to replace the primary drive, and that is what I was planning to do, but since I can't use the new drive on the primary slot, can I instead copy the FID's from drive 0 to drive 1 by entering:

cp -v /drive0/fids/* /drive1/fids (instead of command listed on the FAQ?)

Will this work? I don't see any reason it wouldn't, but I'm not Linux hack and I've got way too much music (20GB) to risk...

Any comments are welcome! I will contact support in the morning for a new cable unless someone can think of another possible culprit.