Scott said:
The drive in questions in in a cage in a drive bay. Sorry. There is
another that is external, but it is currently disconnected.
As far as internal drives, I have the newer hard drive connected with the
older internal hard drive via IDE connector. The older one is FAT32. I
could move all the data to my C: drive and just get rid of that drive and
set
the C: drive as the master if you think that that would help?
I just did, last night, change the IDE cable that was a 40-wire to the
required 80-wire, 40-pin cable. This was suggestion #1 from teh WD
website.
That did not seem to help.
I am guessing that since the cable I changed was an IDE cable all the
drives
that are internal are IDE? Also, when I go through boot up, the screen
shows
no master or slave devices, could it be that the jumpers are not set
correctly? If so, if I designate the master and slave with jumpers at
this
point, will that mess up the system?
As far as the keyboard, I will check the bios for USB support, otherwise
add
the adapter.
The C: drive is a WD and their website is saying that the 3rd cause could
be
the BIOS configured to force faster UDMA modes than the EIDE controller
can
support. I have not tried to look at this yet, but will try tonight.
By the way, thanks so much for you assistnace with this. You have been
very
helpful.
In Device Manager, check the properties for the IDE controller(s) to check
that "DMA if available" is checked. Sometimes it isn't which means your
drives are operating at their slowest speed for whatever is the maximum
supported by the controller or the slowest device sharing the same
controller. Later controllers permit mixing different DMA mode devices on
the same channel and the controller will switch between the DMA mode
appropriate for the device. Older IDE controllers used only one DMA mode
for its channel, so you got the DMA mode for both devices on that channel
based on which device has the slowest DMA mode.
If you have a hard drive that exceed ATA-3 UMDA-66 then you need to use the
80-wire/40-pin data cable. If you connect a low- and high-speed drive
together on the same data cable, you need to use the data cable needed by
the high-speed device. The other 40 wires are not signal wires but instead
used to reduce cross-talk between the parallel wires (having parallel wires
was a bad design choice for a signal cable).
If you don't see the IDE hard drives listed in the BIOS screen (after the
POST completes), either the BIOS is configured not to show that table or you
are not connecting the hard drives to IDE ports on the motherboard. The
motherboard BIOS can only show the drives connected to the IDE ports on the
motherboard. Perhaps you are using an IDE controller daughtercard to which
your hard drives are attached. That has its own BIOS (and should separately
show what drives it found).
The quality of the removable drive bay (carrier and cage) determine how long
it will survive without bending pins, the correct order of applying power
(the data cable should connect before the power cable when sliding in the
carrier with drive into the cage), and how well the pins make contact. If
this is the second drive on the same cable as the other drive, see what
happens when you leave it out. You probably don't need access to the data
on the removable drive during the test. Also, your other drive that is left
in the host may have a setting for Master and another for StandAlone and the
two are not the same. Some drives don't function properly if set to Master
and there is no slave drive also attached (so you have to set them to the
StandAlone mode).
I don't recall my BIOS letting me set the DMA mode. I can set the LBA mode
and CHS parameters but those are for geometry translation for large drives
and are unrelated to the DMA mode supported by the drive. DMA mode should
be an auto-detect function of the BIOS (which gets overridden by the mass
storage subsystem and drivers in the OS, and why I mentioned looking in
Device Manager).
