A drive previously working as slave all of a sudden decides not to?

[Yousuf Khan]

Some wierd things were happening on a relative's PC recently. I had
setup this PC for them originally, and they said they were having
trouble booting anymore, none of the drives were seen. I had two drives
on the primary channel, a 60G master and an older 20G slave. They were
both setup using cable select rather than hard-coding through the
jumpers as master/slave. This pair of drives had been working in this
combination for well over a year without a problem. Then all of a sudden
a couple of days back all hell breaks loose randomly. I was hard pressed
to find out what went wrong, even went so far as to replace the
motherboard (thought the IDE channel had died on the motherboard).
Eventually after trying it one drive at a time, I figured out it was a
problem only when the 20G drive was set as slave through cable select
this problem occurred. Funny thing is that I can hard-code it as slave
and it works fine. Oh, BTW, this same 20G drive works fine as cable
selected master, just not cable-selected slave.

Anybody have ideas what caused this?

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rod Speed]

Some wierd things were happening on a relative's PC recently. I had
setup this PC for them originally, and they said they were having
trouble booting anymore, none of the drives were seen. I had two
drives on the primary channel, a 60G master and an older 20G slave.
They were both setup using cable select rather than hard-coding
through the jumpers as master/slave. This pair of drives had been
working in this combination for well over a year without a problem.
Then all of a sudden a couple of days back all hell breaks loose
randomly. I was hard pressed to find out what went wrong, even went
so far as to replace the motherboard (thought the IDE channel had
died on the motherboard). Eventually after trying it one drive at a
time, I figured out it was a problem only when the 20G drive was set
as slave through cable select this problem occurred. Funny thing is
that I can hard-code it as slave and it works fine. Oh, BTW, this
same 20G drive works fine as cable selected master, just not
cable-selected slave.

Anybody have ideas what caused this?

The ribbon cable could have gone bad.

The 20G drive could have a faulty jumper or a bad joint in the jumper area.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Some wierd things were happening on a relative's PC recently. I had
setup this PC for them originally, and they said they were having
trouble booting anymore, none of the drives were seen. I had two drives
on the primary channel, a 60G master and an older 20G slave. They were
both setup using cable select rather than hard-coding through the
jumpers as master/slave. This pair of drives had been working in this
combination for well over a year without a problem. Then all of a sudden
a couple of days back all hell breaks loose randomly. I was hard pressed
to find out what went wrong, even went so far as to replace the
motherboard (thought the IDE channel had died on the motherboard).
Eventually after trying it one drive at a time, I figured out it was a
problem only when the 20G drive was set as slave through cable select
this problem occurred. Funny thing is that I can hard-code it as slave
and it works fine. Oh, BTW, this same 20G drive works fine as cable
selected master, just not cable-selected slave.

Anybody have ideas what caused this?

Yousuf Khan

Maybe a bad contact in the cable... Although that seems rather
unlikely to me.

Arno

 

[Yousuf Khan]

The ribbon cable could have gone bad.

I had thought of that, and changed the cable too, as the first order of
business. That didn't work, so then I thought about the motherboard IDE
interface going bad.

The 20G drive could have a faulty jumper or a bad joint in the jumper area.

Yeah, I suppose.


Yousuf Khan

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

The ribbon cable could have gone bad.

The 20G drive could have a faulty jumper
Nope.

or a bad joint in the jumper area.

in the drive's Cable Select logic, rather.

 

[Rod Speed]

Nope.

Yep, if it cant be jumpered for cable select anymore due to a faulty jumper.