Shoutbox

I'm having some trouble getting my old IDE drive to work properly in my new computer which came with a SATA based harddrive. I've narrowed the problem down to Windows using PIO instead of DMA for data transfer (or should I say this is a symptom of the problem, seen as the Windows HDD controller manager is set to use DMA if available). Plz check out this thread for the whole story

Thnx!

i know it sounds silly.. but are the jumpers set as slave? some hdd have several positions for slave, if you can, try another ones, but be careful! and remember where they were originally, if this doesnt work, and i think it can affect the speed... but im not really sure.. perhaps im all wrong

well I've tried setting both jumpers (there's a DVD drive sharing the cable) to cable select. I've also tried setting the DVD drive to master and the HDD to slave, no change whatsoever... The BIOS still fails to properly detect the harddrive and Windows acts in the same way.

yeah, maybe I sould explain the BIOS situation. There's an option to enable/disable each PATA port (2 in all). By default the DVD-drive port is enabled and the second port disabled. When I plug in my IDE harddrive and leave the 2nd port to "Disabled", it works in Windows in this horrible PIO mode and doesn't show up in the BIOS.
If I enable the 2nd port where the HDD is plugged in, things get even worse.. neither the IDE HDD nor the DVD drive show up in Windows

and...have you tried without the dvd? is there another ide port?

If you have a DVD (or cdrom) and HDD on the same channel, set the HDD as master and DVD (or cdrom) as slave. A dvd (or cdrom) works much slower than a HDD and if set as master may interfear with the HDD (don't ask why though, I have no clue, as it shouldn't happen; though I have experienced such behaviour in practice).

As for the different operating modes. A HDD should always be reconized by the BIOS for starters. If it is not, than there is something wrong with the master/slave settings or bios settings to start with and in that case it would be the first thing to correct/set right. If it is reconized, you often can change the operating mode in the BIOS. Set it to what your drive supports!

After that, you often can select in Windows almost the same setting of operation, this, of course, should be the same (but as said, make first sure that it is reconized by the BIOS to start with, otherwise it is of no use to fiddle with Windows settings anyways).

quote:

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
If you have a DVD (or cdrom) and HDD on the same channel, set the HDD as master and DVD (or cdrom) as slave. A dvd (or cdrom) works much slower than a HDD and if set as master may interfear with the HDD (don't ask why though, I have no clue, as it shouldn't happen; though I have experienced such behaviour in practice).

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This solved the problem - thanks! Just proves how strange computers can be, the HDD's performance being influenced by a minor thing like this. Both drives are now correctly detected in the BIOS and fucntion properly in Windows.

Yeah, it has to do with how IDE drives work, both drives will recieve commands, but only one drive will know what to do with it. If the first one (the master) is a DVD/CDROM, the signal (for the HDD) will never reach the HDD... so to speak; something like that...