Drive only detected if powered on after POST

[Brian Groose]

I'm having a problem trying to get my "old" Western Digital 120GB
(WD1200BB) drive to work in my new system. If the drive is connected,
then the BIOS hangs while trying to detect it. If I don't power on
the drive until after I enter the BIOS setup, then it is detected just
fine, and everything works until the next time I completely turn off
the system.

- I've tried several power supplies, 250W, 300W, and 380W, and that
didn't matter.
- The drive is jumpered correctly, as a single master, and WDC
diagnostics didn't find anything wrong.
- There are no other drives or cards installed in the system, just the
Motherboard, CPU and 120GB drive.
- The same problem occurs if I use an add-on ATA card.
- This drive still works fine if I put it in my old Athlon 650 system.
- A 40GB 5400RPM Maxtor drive does not exhibit this problem in the
system, it is detected right away.

Right now, the system consists of:
- Soltek 75MRN-L motherboard
- Athlon XP 2500+ Barton CPU
- Centon 512MB PC2700 RAM
- WD1200BB Western Digital 120GB hard drive

Has anyone run into a problem like this before? Any other ideas on
what parts to swap? I RMA'd the original motherboard because it did
this, but since the second one does it, I'm guessing it's something
else. The drive is one of the early WD 120GB drives, and not under
warrantly anymore.

Thanks for any help!

Brian

 

[JAD]

auto detect is enabled in the bios for the IDE controllers?

 

[user]

I'm having a problem trying to get my "old" Western Digital 120GB
(WD1200BB) drive to work in my new system. If the drive is connected,
then the BIOS hangs while trying to detect it. If I don't power on
the drive until after I enter the BIOS setup, then it is detected just
fine, and everything works until the next time I completely turn off
the system.

- I've tried several power supplies, 250W, 300W, and 380W, and that
didn't matter.
- The drive is jumpered correctly, as a single master, and WDC
diagnostics didn't find anything wrong.
- There are no other drives or cards installed in the system, just the
Motherboard, CPU and 120GB drive.
- The same problem occurs if I use an add-on ATA card.
- This drive still works fine if I put it in my old Athlon 650 system.
- A 40GB 5400RPM Maxtor drive does not exhibit this problem in the
system, it is detected right away.

Right now, the system consists of:
- Soltek 75MRN-L motherboard
- Athlon XP 2500+ Barton CPU
- Centon 512MB PC2700 RAM
- WD1200BB Western Digital 120GB hard drive

Has anyone run into a problem like this before? Any other ideas on
what parts to swap? I RMA'd the original motherboard because it did
this, but since the second one does it, I'm guessing it's something
else. The drive is one of the early WD 120GB drives, and not under
warrantly anymore.

Thanks for any help!

Brian

I have seen where some hard drives do not get up to speed fast enough
for the bios to detect the drive when looking for a hard drive. That
might be happening here if you can detect the drive AFTER it is once
running. If the drive is consistently detected properly after once
having been detected by BIOS, leave power on and do a Ctrl+Alt+Del.
Since the drive never stopped, the speed will already be up and it might
detect it every time. If so, it would support the drive speed theory.
One way you might overcome such a problem is to remove the Fast Boot
option in CMOS so that it allows the drive more time to get up to speed.

Ken

 

[Brian Groose]

Yes. However, if I turn auto detect off, the system will boot just
fine. If I go into the BIOS with auto detect off, and try to detect
the drive in there, it will hang in the BIOS.

 

[Brian Groose]

I have seen where some hard drives do not get up to speed fast enough
for the bios to detect the drive when looking for a hard drive. That
might be happening here if you can detect the drive AFTER it is once
running. If the drive is consistently detected properly after once
having been detected by BIOS, leave power on and do a Ctrl+Alt+Del.
Since the drive never stopped, the speed will already be up and it might
detect it every time. If so, it would support the drive speed theory.
One way you might overcome such a problem is to remove the Fast Boot
option in CMOS so that it allows the drive more time to get up to speed.

Ken

I don't have a Fast Boot option in this particular BIOS (that I could
find, at least). But when I power the system on, and it hangs trying
to detect the drive, then I reboot it, it still hangs after that, even
though the drive is clearly powered up at that point.
If I power the system on with auto detect disabled, I can go into the
BIOS and try to auto detect the drive manually. It still hangs in
this case, and the drive has had plenty of time to power up by then.
I've never seen anything like this before, and it's really confusing
me!

Brian

 

[JAD]

try a new cable.....I was just about to toss a Burner when I decided to replace (The new) cable, still have the burner.... ;^)

 

[Patch]

I'm having a problem trying to get my "old" Western Digital 120GB
(WD1200BB) drive to work in my new system. If the drive is connected,
then the BIOS hangs while trying to detect it. If I don't power on
the drive until after I enter the BIOS setup, then it is detected just
fine, and everything works until the next time I completely turn off
the system.

- I've tried several power supplies, 250W, 300W, and 380W, and that
didn't matter.
- The drive is jumpered correctly, as a single master, and WDC
diagnostics didn't find anything wrong.
- There are no other drives or cards installed in the system, just the
Motherboard, CPU and 120GB drive.
- The same problem occurs if I use an add-on ATA card.
- This drive still works fine if I put it in my old Athlon 650 system.
- A 40GB 5400RPM Maxtor drive does not exhibit this problem in the
system, it is detected right away.

Right now, the system consists of:
- Soltek 75MRN-L motherboard
- Athlon XP 2500+ Barton CPU
- Centon 512MB PC2700 RAM
- WD1200BB Western Digital 120GB hard drive

Has anyone run into a problem like this before? Any other ideas on
what parts to swap? I RMA'd the original motherboard because it did
this, but since the second one does it, I'm guessing it's something
else. The drive is one of the early WD 120GB drives, and not under
warrantly anymore.

Thanks for any help!

Brian

Rather than letting BIOS detect it with the "Auto" setting, set it for "User
defined". If you don't know the settings, go to WD's web site & get the info
from them.

 

[KC Computers]

I'm having a problem trying to get my "old" Western Digital 120GB
Brian, if it's the only drive on the cable then you need to
remove the jumper from Master. For WD drives, you only put a jumper on
Master when there is a Slave drive on the same cable.

 

[Brian Groose]

I'm having a problem trying to get my "old" Western Digital 120GB
(WD1200BB) drive to work in my new system. If the drive is connected,
then the BIOS hangs while trying to detect it. If I don't power on
the drive until after I enter the BIOS setup, then it is detected just
fine, and everything works until the next time I completely turn off
the system.

- I've tried several power supplies, 250W, 300W, and 380W, and that
didn't matter.
- The drive is jumpered correctly, as a single master, and WDC
diagnostics didn't find anything wrong.
- There are no other drives or cards installed in the system, just the
Motherboard, CPU and 120GB drive.
- The same problem occurs if I use an add-on ATA card.
- This drive still works fine if I put it in my old Athlon 650 system.
- A 40GB 5400RPM Maxtor drive does not exhibit this problem in the
system, it is detected right away.

Right now, the system consists of:
- Soltek 75MRN-L motherboard
- Athlon XP 2500+ Barton CPU
- Centon 512MB PC2700 RAM
- WD1200BB Western Digital 120GB hard drive

Has anyone run into a problem like this before? Any other ideas on
what parts to swap? I RMA'd the original motherboard because it did
this, but since the second one does it, I'm guessing it's something
else. The drive is one of the early WD 120GB drives, and not under
warrantly anymore.

I hooked up a separate power supply to the hard drive from an external
enclosure, and if I power that and the system on at the same time,
everything works great! It almost seems like the PSU in the case
isn't getting enough power to the drive during the initial startup,
and the drive gets in some weird wedged state. Someone else suggested
trying a different outlet, so I'm going to try playing with more
power-related issues.

Brian

 

[Strontium]

-
Brian Groose stood up at show-n-tell, in
(e-mail address removed), and said:

I hooked up a separate power supply to the hard drive from an external
enclosure, and if I power that and the system on at the same time,
everything works great! It almost seems like the PSU in the case
isn't getting enough power to the drive during the initial startup,
and the drive gets in some weird wedged state. Someone else suggested
trying a different outlet, so I'm going to try playing with more
power-related issues.

It might be that all of the PSU's you've tried, up to this point are crap
and cannot handle the full load of everything in your case. I think the
fact that a separate PSU solves the issue, points to that. You never
mentioned what brand of PSU's you've used. There are a lot of crap ones,
out there.

 

[Brian Groose]

-
Brian Groose stood up at show-n-tell, in
(e-mail address removed), and said:


It might be that all of the PSU's you've tried, up to this point are crap
and cannot handle the full load of everything in your case. I think the
fact that a separate PSU solves the issue, points to that. You never
mentioned what brand of PSU's you've used. There are a lot of crap ones,
out there.

I'm using Antecs, and I'm pretty sure they got decent reviews.
The 250W was an older sparkle, which was approved for my Athlon 650 at
the time.
The 300W is an Antec SmartPower.
The 380W is an Antec TruePower

 

[Strontium]

-
Brian Groose stood up at show-n-tell, in
(e-mail address removed), and said:

I'm using Antecs, and I'm pretty sure they got decent reviews.
The 250W was an older sparkle, which was approved for my Athlon 650 at
the time.
The 300W is an Antec SmartPower.
The 380W is an Antec TruePower

Ahh, well, then that stinks. Antec is very prestigious, for sure. Only
thing I would guess, then, is some sort of voltage regulation deficiency of
the motherboard. Either that, or a defective HDD.

 

[Brian Groose]

-
Brian Groose stood up at show-n-tell, in
(e-mail address removed), and said:


Ahh, well, then that stinks. Antec is very prestigious, for sure. Only
thing I would guess, then, is some sort of voltage regulation deficiency of
the motherboard. Either that, or a defective HDD.

I just went and picked up a 120GB Maxtor, and that seems to work fine.
Seems like some sort of weird incompatibility or something. I'll just
DriveImage the disk over, and my Tivo will be getting a huge
disk-space upgrade.
Thanks for everyone's suggestions!

Brian

 

[Guest]

I don't have a Fast Boot option in this particular BIOS (that I could
find, at least). But when I power the system on, and it hangs trying
to detect the drive, then I reboot it, it still hangs after that, even
though the drive is clearly powered up at that point.
If I power the system on with auto detect disabled, I can go into the
BIOS and try to auto detect the drive manually. It still hangs in
this case, and the drive has had plenty of time to power up by then.

Try the WD drive without the 40-pin/80-wire cable ribbon cable plugged
into it because if the motherboard then boots normally from another
device, the problem is definitely not inadequate power but a BIOS
incompatibility, either the drive's BIOS or the motherboard's. WD has
issued a few BIOS upgrades for problems, but in one case they had to
replace the drives because a chipset manufacturer didn't meet official
ATA specs. But I have a feeling that your motherboard BIOS just
doesn't handle fast CPUs correctly in all instances, and this is
definitely the case if slowing the CPU bus in the setup (FSB speed)
helps. By the way, I'm fairly sure your BIOS has a fast/slow boot
selection in its Advanced Options menu, probably under fast/slow
power-on test. Another thing to try is a plug-in IDE controller
because that will bypass the motherboard's IDE controller, but in one
case even that didn't help me because the problem turned out to be
slightly low voltage.

I hope you're not using a round IDE cable because most make the
signals worse, and it's possible that some drives don't handle bad
signals as well as others do. If you insist on a round cable, be sure
it contains twisted pairs of wires, not straight wires.

 

[Brian Groose]

Try the WD drive without the 40-pin/80-wire cable ribbon cable plugged
into it because if the motherboard then boots normally from another
device, the problem is definitely not inadequate power but a BIOS
incompatibility, either the drive's BIOS or the motherboard's. WD has
issued a few BIOS upgrades for problems, but in one case they had to
replace the drives because a chipset manufacturer didn't meet official
ATA specs. But I have a feeling that your motherboard BIOS just
doesn't handle fast CPUs correctly in all instances, and this is
definitely the case if slowing the CPU bus in the setup (FSB speed)
helps. By the way, I'm fairly sure your BIOS has a fast/slow boot
selection in its Advanced Options menu, probably under fast/slow
power-on test. Another thing to try is a plug-in IDE controller
because that will bypass the motherboard's IDE controller, but in one
case even that didn't help me because the problem turned out to be
slightly low voltage.

I hope you're not using a round IDE cable because most make the
signals worse, and it's possible that some drives don't handle bad
signals as well as others do. If you insist on a round cable, be sure
it contains twisted pairs of wires, not straight wires.

I just tried powering up the system with the drive power plugged in,
but not the ribbon cable, and it worked fine (well, it didn't detect
the disk obviously, but no hang).

When the CPU was clocked with a 100 or 133MHz FSB (normally 166), it
still had the same problem, so I don't think it has anything to do
with the CPU speed. I had tried it with an add-on card, and it still
wasn't detected, which really made me think it's not the BIOS. I just
went out and bought a Maxtor 120GB drive, and that seems to be working
just fine, so it seems specific to the WD drive.

I'm using a normal, flat 80-wire IDE cable, and I've tried several of
them, just to be sure that wasn't the issue.

I didn't see anything that looked even close to a fast/slow boot, but
I'll take another look around. Though if start-up duration is the
problem, Ctrl-Alt-Del after the hang should cause the drive to be
detected on the next boot, but it just hangs. Thanks for the
suggestions!

Brian

 

[larrymoencurly]

If the drive is connected, then the BIOS hangs while trying to
detect it. If I don't power on the drive until after I enter
the BIOS setup, then it is detected just fine, and everything
works until the next time I completely turn off the system.

- Soltek 75MRN-L motherboard
- Athlon XP 2500+ Barton CPU
- Centon 512MB PC2700 RAM
- WD1200BB Western Digital 120GB hard drive

I just went and picked up a 120GB Maxtor, and that seems to work
fine. Seems like some sort of weird incompatibility or something.

You're the second person in a week who's reported a booting problem
with a Soltek mobo and a WD1200xx HD. I found that WD has some files
to flash some of their HDs to solve certain compatibility problems,
and while none of the files seem to be related to a boot problem like
yours, it wouldn't hurt to try upgrading with something like this:

http://support.wdc.com/download/raid/wdc_cfg.zip

Caution: WD has two different files named wdc_cfg.zip, one for HDs
connected to their own RAID controllers and another for those
connected to other RAID controllers.

I flashed my WD1200JB made in 11/2002 with this, and at least it
didn't hurt it.

 

[Brian Groose]

You're the second person in a week who's reported a booting problem
with a Soltek mobo and a WD1200xx HD. I found that WD has some files
to flash some of their HDs to solve certain compatibility problems,
and while none of the files seem to be related to a boot problem like
yours, it wouldn't hurt to try upgrading with something like this:

http://support.wdc.com/download/raid/wdc_cfg.zip

Caution: WD has two different files named wdc_cfg.zip, one for HDs
connected to their own RAID controllers and another for those
connected to other RAID controllers.

I flashed my WD1200JB made in 11/2002 with this, and at least it
didn't hurt it.

I actually tried that one already, in the hopes it would do something.
It didn't make any difference. I think it's just some weird
firmware/bios incompatibility.

Brian