S
Steve Goodman
Has anyone here had to wrestle as much as I have with this?
I've a WD ATA-100 drive that's a boot volume C:, while an IDE drive on the
Primary IDE port is D:. I have to physically detach the IDE drive to
install or repair Windows 2000. Otherwise, despite being set with disabled
boot status in the BIOS, re-establishment as a non-primary partition, and
not having the remotest trace of a Win2K installation on it - not even an
old one! - Windows 2000 Setup goes right for the IDE drive instead of the
ATA, whenever Setup is run.
Yes, I understand how ATA-100 drives weren't exactly out in the market being
fully supported with Windows 2000 came out - and I know how SP3 was supposed
to resolve this. WD's Data Diagnostics disk runs easily on the drive from
its boot diskette, and reports absolutely no errors on the surface, or the
logic board. One would think, however, that with all patches and SP4
installed, it wouldn't occur.
After the past 12 hours with an apparently corrupted
\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM file, where the IDE kept getting in the way of
properly repairing the setup, I've pretty much decided never to use an ATA
drive for a boot volume if at all ever again, and have come to think of ATA
as a latter-day SCSI clone of sorts. Which pretty much equates in my book
to "don't use the technology if you don't have to".
(On my own PC, I've had to put up with the lumbering behemoth of SCSI just
to have a CDRW drive onboard - and, thanks to faster and immensely cheaper
(not SCSI, therefore by default cheaper) CDRW drives on the IDE channel. So
I actually look forward to the day coming up when the Yamaha 4416s gives it
up, so I can yank the damned Adaptec stuff outta this machine, and put an
IDE CDRW or DVD-R in, to say nothing of introduce greater stability.)
So I've got to ask, do any of the ATA-100 drive users on this newsgroup also
have drives on the IDE channels as well, and if so do they have to contend
with this conflict? Or is it generally like it was with big SCSI drives in
a machine, that the otherwise-foreign BIOS is happiest when there are no
other drives in the box with it?
I've a WD ATA-100 drive that's a boot volume C:, while an IDE drive on the
Primary IDE port is D:. I have to physically detach the IDE drive to
install or repair Windows 2000. Otherwise, despite being set with disabled
boot status in the BIOS, re-establishment as a non-primary partition, and
not having the remotest trace of a Win2K installation on it - not even an
old one! - Windows 2000 Setup goes right for the IDE drive instead of the
ATA, whenever Setup is run.
Yes, I understand how ATA-100 drives weren't exactly out in the market being
fully supported with Windows 2000 came out - and I know how SP3 was supposed
to resolve this. WD's Data Diagnostics disk runs easily on the drive from
its boot diskette, and reports absolutely no errors on the surface, or the
logic board. One would think, however, that with all patches and SP4
installed, it wouldn't occur.
After the past 12 hours with an apparently corrupted
\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM file, where the IDE kept getting in the way of
properly repairing the setup, I've pretty much decided never to use an ATA
drive for a boot volume if at all ever again, and have come to think of ATA
as a latter-day SCSI clone of sorts. Which pretty much equates in my book
to "don't use the technology if you don't have to".
(On my own PC, I've had to put up with the lumbering behemoth of SCSI just
to have a CDRW drive onboard - and, thanks to faster and immensely cheaper
(not SCSI, therefore by default cheaper) CDRW drives on the IDE channel. So
I actually look forward to the day coming up when the Yamaha 4416s gives it
up, so I can yank the damned Adaptec stuff outta this machine, and put an
IDE CDRW or DVD-R in, to say nothing of introduce greater stability.)
So I've got to ask, do any of the ATA-100 drive users on this newsgroup also
have drives on the IDE channels as well, and if so do they have to contend
with this conflict? Or is it generally like it was with big SCSI drives in
a machine, that the otherwise-foreign BIOS is happiest when there are no
other drives in the box with it?