OT: PC Driving Me Nuts

[the_constructor]

Has anyone come across this before.

I am building a PC for a young lady coming to live back in our village, using parts generously donated.

Got an M810L motherboard and fitted it to the PC tower case.

It has 256M installed on the board to start with (Soldered chips) so installed a further 128 Mb to bring it to 384Mb.

Installing a hard drive and a CD drive. Hard drive goes as PriMaster, CD drive goes as SecMaster, except Bios doesn't see the CD drive. However, change round to CD drive PriMaster and hard drive to SecMaster, Bios sees them both.

Boot up on a floppy for testing purposes and the hard drive is drive C and the CD drive is drive D.

I know all the connections are where they should be originally because I followed the book.

Anyone explain this strange phenomenon....?

James

[Redman]

Does the BIOS allow you to Auto detect HDD or CD/DVD drives attached? I know in my BIOS if somethings not being detected I have an Autoselect/detect option. I know this might sound stupid but what about the jumper settings on the back of both drives?

Redman

[anythingyoulike]

Or try the HDD as Master and the CD as slave

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Is that a cable select system? Try master and slave - that works on older MBs.

[Vernon]

On some older chipsets you had to fill the IDE bus in sequence, IE Pri Master then Pri Slave then Sec Master finally Sec Slave, any gaps caused all sorts of problems.

[Keith W]

Also some older systems insisted on the master being at the end of the data cable like cable select even though they were configured as master and slave. That has caught me out a couple of times.

It sounds as if the OP is trying to put the two devices on separate IDE connections whereas he would be better putting both on IDE 1 as master (HDD) and slave (CD).

[Harry Bloomfield]

It happens that Keith W formulated :

I don't know if it is still the case, but on older systems mixing a (slow) CD drive and a HDD on the same bus cable as master and slave would slow the HDD down drastically. Better to have them on separate interfaces and always plugged into the farthest socket on the cable (rather than the middle one) to prevent reflections on the cable.

[Cicero]

========================================= Have you tried clearing the BIOS? Many MBs have a jumper for this purpose which should be shown in your manual, complete with instructions.

Cic.

[dennis]

Windows sees the first HD primary partition as "C". It doesn't really care what the BIOS sees.

[Clint Sharp]

In message , the_constructor writes

You have an 80 conductor cable and the drive select on the CD-ROM drive is set to slave but you have put it on the end connector or it's master and you've put it on the middle connector.

[John Rumm]

That used to be the case before ATAPI devices supported mode 4 and 5 block transfers. They do these days, so its a non issue.

[Huge]

And people used to complain that SCSI was too complicated ...

[Andrew Gabriel]

ATAPI is basically SCSI packaged up so it can pass over the ATA interface. ;-)

[Huge]

That'll be why Linux shares drivers. I always wondered.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Yep - same on Solaris.

CD-ROM drives were originally all SCSI, but they weren't originally used on PC's where SCSI was unheard of at the time. When they got cheap enough to start appearing on the PC scene, there some proprietary interfaces (like Soundblaster's one), and SCSI ones except SCSI host adapters were still very expensive. As SCSI adapters came down in price, the proprietry interfaces died, and PC's settled on SCSI CD drives. When PC's got to the point where CD drives were standard fit rather than an optional extra (which is what squeezed the 5.25" floppy drive out of the PC case), the push to force the price down squeezed out the SCSI host adapter by making CD's with ATA interfaces. Trouble was that ATA had a far too simple a command set for accessing the features of CD's which were available through SCSI, so they basically came up with a way to pass SCSI commands over the ATA interface, and ATAPI was born. That became so popular, that vendors all stopped making native SCSI physical interface CD drives (or DVD drives by this point). We now have SATA versions of course, now that SATA has taken over from [P]ATA. I must have a look at what happens when you connect one to a SAS controller. I suspect you end up with SCSI tunnelled over ATA (i.e. ATAPI), tunneled over SAS (serial SCSI). What fun!

[Ron O'Brien]

Absolutely, even on more recent boards it is always good practice to put slow drives (CD/DVD etc) on the second IDE socket to help with performance and especially against drop-outs if copying/writing from a HDD to CD-/RW.

To the OP = have you ensured the jumpers are correctly set? I once had a hard drive (Seagate I think) and the diagram on the drive seemed to suggest that the slave was the second jumper from the left, but was in fact the second from the right i.e. the diagram didn't explain your viewpoint! All that is superfluous if you set both as master and use the IDE1 & 2 sockets.

Ron

[Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)]

Check for a USB steering wheel attached to your willy.

[Jules]

I don't know why it got such a bad rep, TBH. I was a happy SCSI user for many years because it Just Worked, compared to IDE which was always so slow and buggy.

I only stopped using it on some of the systems because the cost per MB became so high, but I still find it preferable on any systems that don't require acres of storage space.

[Huge]

Me neither.

Me too.

I don't understand this. The disk mechanicals are exactly the same - these days the controllers are a piggy-back card which plugs into the heads, head solenoid and drive motor. Want an IDE (aka ATA, aka PATA) drive? Plug in the ATA card. Want a SCSI drive? Plug in the SCSI card. Hell, as has just been explained, they're virtually the same thing anyway. So why are SCSI drives 4 times the cost of SATA ones?

[Clive George]

I can pay 70-odd quid or less for a 500G SATA drive. Or over 500 quid for the same drive (same model no, everything), wrapped in a Netapp caddy.

My SCSI drives (or rather SAS these days) seem to be different hardware to my SATA ones - RPM differences mainly. But yes, they've got an eye out for the corporate accounts, who don't seem to be so price sensitive, so the SCSI ones get the prices jacked to take advantage of this.

(Netapp - dead good, dead clever, more than eyewateringly expensive - tens of thousands of quid to add NFS support for example...)