P4C800E-dlx and promise controller

[Jgibbs]

Weird problem just came up and I can't track down the root cause.

I've got a 40 Gig and 160 Gig HD on primary IDE and a DVD writer & CD
writer on the secondary IDE. On the promise controller I have another 30
Gig HD. Every so often I take the 40 Gig HD out of my satellite so I can
record video on to my computer. This week, when I booted up, the
satellite HD made this disturbing ticking sound as if the drive head was
repeatedly hitting some kind of internal stopper.

Anyway, I powered down and rebooted and have had trouble accessing the
satellite HD since then. The program I normally use to take the
recordings off no longer works (hangs and gives me an I/O error). A
different program (slower) does work.

So I had a look at my disk drives in device manager and noticed that the
drives on the promise controller now say they're SCSI drives! Maybe they
always are detected that way in windows (due to the controller) but I've
never noticed that before. Is it possible something messed up in windows
during that initial boot up? Can I fix the drives so that they show up
as plain IDE?

Thanks!

 

[RBM]

It's normal for them to show up as SCSI

 

[Clark Griswold]

Weird problem just came up and I can't track down the root cause.

I've got a 40 Gig and 160 Gig HD on primary IDE and a DVD writer & CD
writer on the secondary IDE. On the promise controller I have another 30
Gig HD. Every so often I take the 40 Gig HD out of my satellite so I can
record video on to my computer. This week, when I booted up, the
satellite HD made this disturbing ticking sound as if the drive head was
repeatedly hitting some kind of internal stopper.

Anyway, I powered down and rebooted and have had trouble accessing the
satellite HD since then. The program I normally use to take the
recordings off no longer works (hangs and gives me an I/O error). A
different program (slower) does work.

So I had a look at my disk drives in device manager and noticed that the
drives on the promise controller now say they're SCSI drives! Maybe they
always are detected that way in windows (due to the controller) but I've
never noticed that before. Is it possible something messed up in windows
during that initial boot up? Can I fix the drives so that they show up
as plain IDE?

Thanks!

Sounds like your hard drive is dying. Get all the data off of that drive
*now*. And then, get a diagnostics program from the drive's manufacturer
and run it. It may be still in warranty.

 

[Paul]

Weird problem just came up and I can't track down the root cause.

I've got a 40 Gig and 160 Gig HD on primary IDE and a DVD writer & CD
writer on the secondary IDE. On the promise controller I have another 30
Gig HD. Every so often I take the 40 Gig HD out of my satellite so I can
record video on to my computer. This week, when I booted up, the
satellite HD made this disturbing ticking sound as if the drive head was
repeatedly hitting some kind of internal stopper.

Anyway, I powered down and rebooted and have had trouble accessing the
satellite HD since then. The program I normally use to take the
recordings off no longer works (hangs and gives me an I/O error). A
different program (slower) does work.

So I had a look at my disk drives in device manager and noticed that the
drives on the promise controller now say they're SCSI drives! Maybe they
always are detected that way in windows (due to the controller) but I've
never noticed that before. Is it possible something messed up in windows
during that initial boot up? Can I fix the drives so that they show up
as plain IDE?

Thanks!

Can you place the drive on a Southbridge interface ?
Download the disk manufacturer's disk diagnostic program and
test the drive. Likely the drive is no longer finding track 0.

I had a drive that failed like that. It was a 40GB, and it turns
out, if track 0 is unreadable, the disk controller on the drive,
doesn't even know the true capacity of the drive. It would report
the drive was 10GB, which is the size of that drive if only a
single platter is available. And the drive did tick.

Paul

 

[Jgibbs]

@fe10.lga:

Ok. That eliminates one thing from the list. It's one of those things that
you never pay attention to until you find you have to do something about
it!

OJ

 

[Jgibbs]

Sounds like your hard drive is dying. Get all the data off of that
drive *now*. And then, get a diagnostics program from the drive's
manufacturer and run it. It may be still in warranty.

I'm not too worried about the data since I was able to retrieve it using
another (slower) program. I'll try the diagnostics though. I'll let you
know if it tells me anything interesting.

Thanks!
OJ

 

[Jgibbs]

(e-mail address removed) (Paul) wrote in

Can you place the drive on a Southbridge interface ?
Download the disk manufacturer's disk diagnostic program and
test the drive. Likely the drive is no longer finding track 0.

I had a drive that failed like that. It was a 40GB, and it turns
out, if track 0 is unreadable, the disk controller on the drive,
doesn't even know the true capacity of the drive. It would report
the drive was 10GB, which is the size of that drive if only a
single platter is available. And the drive did tick.

Paul

I know what the southbridge is but what would interface it? Do you mean
use something other than an IDE bus? The funny thing is, when the
computer boots up, it reports UDMA4 when it should be 5 and I can read
from the drive with a different ripping program. It's tough to play
around with though because d*shnet doesn't use ms-dos formatting. Now
that the weekend is here I'll have more time to tinker.

Thanks,
OJ

 

[Paul]

(e-mail address removed) (Paul) wrote in


I know what the southbridge is but what would interface it? Do you mean
use something other than an IDE bus? The funny thing is, when the
computer boots up, it reports UDMA4 when it should be 5 and I can read
from the drive with a different ripping program. It's tough to play
around with though because d*shnet doesn't use ms-dos formatting. Now
that the weekend is here I'll have more time to tinker.

Thanks,
OJ

Southbridge = Pri_IDE, Sec_IDE, SATA1, SATA2
Promise 20378 = Pri_RAID, SATA_RAID1, SATA_RAID2

Paul

 

[Clark Griswold]

Southbridge = Pri_IDE, Sec_IDE, SATA1, SATA2
Promise 20378 = Pri_RAID, SATA_RAID1, SATA_RAID2

Paul

Also, Intel RAID is available on the southbridge.

 

[James Huckabey]

Southbridge = Pri_IDE, Sec_IDE, SATA1, SATA2
Promise 20378 = Pri_RAID, SATA_RAID1, SATA_RAID2

Paul

My Promise is running Sata1,Sata2,IDE-200 and IDE-120, drives
None of which are Raid. Primary controller is my tape drive, Secondary
controller is CD and DVD player/recorders.