what's the prob with this hard drive?

G

Gil Theissen

Just built an XP box but am having frequent problems with the WD hard
drive. Would take forever to detect (30-40 sec.) and 75 sec to complete
boot. Also about 1/3 of the cold boots would get disk failure errors which
would always be cured by soft re-booting, going into the BIOS (wouldn't
even have to do anything inside 'cause HDD always showed up), hitting F10
and exiting.
Thought maybe bad BIOS, but flashed to latest and no change. Ran
scandisk, chkdsk WD Data Lifeguard and all said HDD was fine. But then tried
a different HDD and problem went away completely, so I figured some kinda
problem (have no idea what) with the HDD and that was the problem.
But here's the strange part - put the 'bad' HDD back in as primary
master, but if I attach ANY hard drive as a slave on the same cable (tried 3
different ones so far), the problem goes away entirely. Now the 'bad' HDD
boots up real fast (45 sec. vs. 75 sec.), auto detects almost immediately
and no more disk failures (over past 3 days & 15+ cold reboots).
What the heck's going on?
Gil
Theissen
 
A

AndrewJ

Just built an XP box but am having frequent problems with the WD hard
drive. Would take forever to detect (30-40 sec.) and 75 sec to complete
boot. Also about 1/3 of the cold boots would get disk failure errors which
would always be cured by soft re-booting, going into the BIOS (wouldn't
even have to do anything inside 'cause HDD always showed up), hitting F10
and exiting.
Thought maybe bad BIOS, but flashed to latest and no change. Ran
scandisk, chkdsk WD Data Lifeguard and all said HDD was fine. But then tried
a different HDD and problem went away completely, so I figured some kinda
problem (have no idea what) with the HDD and that was the problem.
But here's the strange part - put the 'bad' HDD back in as primary
master, but if I attach ANY hard drive as a slave on the same cable (tried 3
different ones so far), the problem goes away entirely. Now the 'bad' HDD
boots up real fast (45 sec. vs. 75 sec.), auto detects almost immediately
and no more disk failures (over past 3 days & 15+ cold reboots).
What the heck's going on?
Gil
Theissen
The jumper is set Master with another disk. You need the jumper
setting Master without another disk.
__________
If you give a little they give a lot.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/disco
 
W

Will Dormann

Gil said:
Just built an XP box but am having frequent problems with the WD hard
drive. Would take forever to detect (30-40 sec.) and 75 sec to complete
boot.

If you must post to more than one group, crosspost. Don't multipost.


-WD
 
J

JAD

that's your answer to his question?

Could be the jumpers setting also a bad IDE cable DMA not enabled?
 
A

AMD'r

Check the model on WD's website, I've found sometimes the jumper setting is
different for "Master" when only 1 drive is installed then it is when you
have a slave attached. One example I found was the jumper went vertical on
the middle pins (for master) with 2 drives, but when using a single drive it
went on 2nd and 3rd pins on the bottom row, starting from the right hand
side. I had another setup that I had to actually not use a jumper at all in
order for the drive to be recognized. I just wish someone would come up
with a standard or something...

HTH, AMD'r
 
G

Gil Theissen

Boy you guys are good. The jumper was the problem all right. At first I
thought that couldn't be it, because the only jumper settings marked on the
drive were master, slave and cs. But after going over to the WD website I
found that, sure enough they've got this 'neutral' position for single
drives that isn't even marked.
Thanks very much - Gil Theissen
 

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