Hard drive problems

[nic007]

I have two IDE hard drives. A WD which according to BIOS is the Primary drive and is also the boot drive. The second drive is a Maxtor and according to BIOS is the slave drive. The machine boots quickly so I reckon the hard drive configurations must be correct. The second drive drive however is starting to fail so i disabled it in Windows' hardware section but the drive is still installed. Still, the machine boots quickly. I now want to replace the faulty drive but am running into problems doing so. Removing the faulty drive and replacing it with a second hand drive (which is also a WD and same capacity as the primary drive) results in none of the drives being detected in BIOS. Even when I try to manually detect it in BIOS it does not detect.. So I remove the second drive to see what happens and the boot drive gets detected after a longish delay and then boots. When I re-install the faulty drive, everything is as before and the machine boots quickly with both original drives being detected. Any ideas?

Edit: more info. The originial WD which I am booting from also has my Operating systems. It has a jumper and it is set to "master with slave" The second hand hard drive which I want to install, has no jumper and in this state should be recognised as a master drive according to the sticker on the drive. I want to use the latter drive for storage of data only. What would be the best way forward setting up the hard drives in this scenario?

[mikeb]

"master with slave"

had exactly the same problem with this setting ........ seems like its a bit of a propriety thing..there is a sort of logic to it but not an obvious one.

was a while ago so memory flaky but think I went for straight master .... then again I might have had to use cable select.... I may have even had to set to master AND use a cable arrangement it likes. I would have to go in the case to see what I did..... plus it was only so that I could copy off the contents of the failing drive.

Suggetions...try all options....

mike

[rcrsn51]

The second hand hard drive which I want to install, has no jumper

Are you saying that it has no jumper pins, or that the little jumper block is missing?

[nic007]

The jumper block is missing. Anyways, it seems as if the second hand drive which has no jumper block is also no good anyway because I disconnected the other drive completely and only connected the second hand drive without the jumper block which should then work as if master (according to the sticker on the drive). BIOS recognises this drive after quite a delay, gives the details but then gives a hard disk failure message. I disconnected the jumper block on the original disk (which has one and was set to master with slave) and only booted this drive and it works but with a delay. I've now returned to how the setup was before (the WD with my operating system and jumper block set to master with slave) and the Maxtor drive which I wanted to replace as slave. Interesting thing is that this Maxtor drive does not have a jumper block either and the machine boots fast again - but now I have encountered some sort of a video adapter problem suddenly. The monitor colour is a blueish tint, don't know what happened to red.

[Sylvander]

1. WD PATA HDD jumper settings are somewhat special & different to other HDD's.
I believe they used to be jumpered as "Master with Slave", and "Slave with Master".
Looks like they've now changed the terminology slightly.
Or you might instead set both to "Cable Select".
In both cases, the master should be on the end connection of the "Primary Controller" IDE cable, and the slave on the mid-cable connection.

2. You need to look on the web for the WD recommended settings for your HDD models.
e.g. WD Caviar Blue, and choose model.
e.g. WD3200AABB has "Dual (Master)" & "Dual (Slave)" jumper settings.
You are attempting to use DUAL WD drives [both connected to the Primary IDE controller?], one as master [with the boot flag set on the boot partition (the 1st on the drive)], the other as slave [no boot flag should be set on any of its partitions].

[PANZERKOPF]

"master with slave"

IIRC this option is needed for very old HDDs. Set your primary drive as "master" even
secondary (slave) is connected in same cable.

[Burn_IT]

Some drives have the jumper block on the bottom rather than the end.

Just in case that helps........

[GarySmith]

Nic007,

Are you still having trouble with this drive? If you're getting a hard drive failure message then it's a bad hard drive.

You might try a secondary channel (IDE2, slave) with separate cable and connector on the motherboard and see what results come by that effort.

Usually, if you select for a Master jumper on a main drive then also choose a Slave jumper position on the second drive. Can't select for one and not the other jumpers of second drive on same cable.

Gary
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[Flash]

I would set both hard drives to Cable Select and let the BIOS figure it out. That's what Cable Select is supposed to be for. Assuming the BIOS is not too old to deal with it.

[GarySmith]

I would set both hard drives to Cable Select and let the BIOS figure it out. That's what Cable Select is supposed to be for. Assuming the BIOS is not too old to deal with it.

Provided you have the cable select feature there also has to be a cable-select cable with missing line to perform the task.

Gary
______

[eccentric]

many years ago you could get ide cables where the header in the middle had some of the wires crossed over to make one master and one slave, so you could leave the header pins both on master , or use the second header on the mother board, if you have a spare cable. you only need to select on the drives if you have straight ide cable..... this was about in the 1980,s

[GarySmith]

many years ago you could get ide cables where the header in the middle had some of the wires crossed over to make one master and one slave, so you could leave the header pins both on master , or use the second header on the mother board, if you have a spare cable. you only need to select on the drives if you have straight ide cable..... this was about in the 1980,s

As for what I remember--something about a middle set of twisted cables but remember that being the case for a B: drive. Wow! That was a long time ago.

Gary
______

[Burn_IT]

Like my machines, you mean??

[RetroTechGuy]

many years ago you could get ide cables where the header in the middle had some of the wires crossed over to make one master and one slave, so you could leave the header pins both on master , or use the second header on the mother board, if you have a spare cable. you only need to select on the drives if you have straight ide cable..... this was about in the 1980,s

As for what I remember--something about a middle set of twisted cables but remember that being the case for a B: drive. Wow! That was a long time ago.

Gary
______

Last weekend I tossed a couple museum pieces that I missed in a previous round of cleaning...

One was a "Turbo XT" (you remember, the 10 MHz version of the 8088), the other I had apparently installed a 486 board in an old IBM XT case (you remember the little steel cases that were built like tanks?) -- that critter had a whopping 8 MB or 30 pin SIMMS in it...

[starhawk]

@RetroTechGuy -- I could've used that XT -- I've got one that needs a floppy controller and a couple other parts. Oh well, you didn't know

*ahem*

On topic.

Cables with a twist in them are 34-pin, 34-wire cables, specifically for floppy drives. No other modern computing device has a ribbon cable where a set of wires are twisted/swapped/switched within the cable. (Ethernet cables can have the swap/switch bit, as do Null Modem RS-232 [COMPort Serial] cables -- it's how they work -- but neither of those, quite obviously, are ribbon cables.) Please don't cram a floppy cable into an IDE hard drive, you'll quite likely wreck the drive and the controller on your motherboard...

Oh -- and if you're dealing with floppy drives on very old systems (too old to run Puppy, by far) remember that older floppy drives can actually be jumpered for Drive B:\ operation instead of Drive A:\ operation -- and that using a drive jumpered to B:\ on a cable with the twist, tends to invert its position (and put it back to A:\). Oh joy. (I have done this. It's incredibly confusing.) This is because back then, floppy cables didn't always have the twist that we all take for granted now.

In fact -- all the twist does is swap some control lines. Remember that floppy drives don't have a 'protocol', per se -- the motherboard-side controller directs the drive motors, and the drive spits out a simple serial stream of data consisting of whatever it hits on the disk. It's up to the motherboard-side controller to interpret that stream and translate it into something useful.

SATA hard drives do not have a jumper block, because they are one-drive-per-cable deals. The cable is not a ribbon cable, but rather a simple five-conductor deal that is comparatively narrow, thick, and stiff, and typically red in color (although SATA cables of every color under the rainbow exist -- ASUS usually uses yellow IIRC, Dell of course goes blue, and I've seen at least one Lenovo with a black one).

IDE/PATA cables are 40-wire or 80-wire (depending on age) cables with 40-pin connectors. Compatible hard (and sometimes optical) drives can be paired, or left single. Six pin jumper block (two rows of three pins each -- [:::] ), usually, for master / slave / cable select modes. Note that there are idiosyncrasies -- some weird systems with modern (ATA-100) controllers will not properly recognize drives jumpered into Cable Select mode; Cable Select mode *never* works on really old systems (older than ATA-66 which would be circa Y2K); and, of course, the fun bit about optical drives that sometimes work on the same cable as a hard drive and sometimes render that cable inoperable.

Optical drives (CD,DVD,BluRay) use a subset of ATA called the ATA Packet Interface or ATAPI. Many, many, many IDE/PATA controllers will 'talk' either to hard drives or to optical drives but not both at once -- or, more frustratingly, many hard drives and optical drives other than the particular pairing you want to use. This is actually not a motherboard-side controller problem. What's happening is that the hard drive in the equation doesn't 'speak' ATAPI and since the drives are talking two languages at once, the controller gets confused, tells 'em both to pipe down, and the user is left clueless as to why his or her hard drive and optical drive won't work on the same cable -- which inevitably leads to some shouted words and phrases that you can't say on Saturday Morning Television

One other word on IDE/PATA. If you want your hard drive to run at proper speeds, USE AN EIGHTY WIRE CABLE FFS. This eliminates a thing called 'crosstalk' (wires act as little electromagnets! so crosstalk is when the signal hops wires magnetically and futzes itself up... sort of like the cartoons where the cat plays with a ball of yarn only to get hopelessly entangled). Your computer will know if you're using a chintzy old forty-wire cable and will throttle you down to ATA-33 (slow slow slow slow slow) at boot until you shut the system down and fix it. This also goes for functional hard drive / optical drive pairings. Optical drives on their own are quite fine with a forty-wire cable, as they're typically much too slow to go at ATA-100 speeds anyways, simply by virtue of how they work.

[RetroTechGuy]

@RetroTechGuy -- I could've used that XT -- I've got one that needs a floppy controller and a couple other parts. Oh well, you didn't know .

I'll keep my eyes peeled as I dig though the rest of the junk I have laying around (cards take up less space, so it's possible I still have one...)

You just want a standard ISA slot floppy controller? (you're dealing with a system that doesn't have the floppy driver on the MB? I think that my turbo XT was on the MB -- but I may have some older stuff).

What other parts are you looking for?

[RetroTechGuy]

Cables with a twist in them are 34-pin, 34-wire cables, specifically for floppy drives. No other modern computing device has a ribbon cable where a set of wires are twisted/swapped/switched within the cable.

The twist allows you to put 2 floppies on the same cable. "A" sits on the end of the cable (post twist), "B" sits back further on the cable...

And if IIRC old HDD cables did the same trick... Back in the MFM, RLL, ESDI era... I can't picture anyone still using those (I once had some ESDI drives that had a SCSI controller/converter -- 300MB each. I just bought a used WD ESDI card, and drove them directly).

My XT had a 20 MB MFM in it -- but the processor doesn't have the instruction set, the memory is too small, and the HDD is too small to run any Linux that I'm aware of... There was once a project to get first 286s running Linux, and then 8088/8086 family (with the idea of using them as dumb terminals). But the project took so long that computer obsolescence outran it -- 486s were available cheap or free, and the project died...

Well, I see that ELKS can apparently do so... I recently got a 3+GHz machine with 3GB RAM that was a "discard" -- other than as a hobby, I don't know why anyone would bother...

http://elks.sourceforge.net/FAQ-English.html

[mikeb]

other than as a hobby, I don't know why anyone would bother...

I think you sum up my feelings about here quite nicely

I am a generic stick in the mud and hate throwing away anything that works but stuff here I would have junked years ago except it died already like the cheap commercial stuff often does.

Thing is no one is using steam powered automobiles / cars that I know of

mike

[starhawk]

ELKS is very much a work in process. I'm good friends IRL with the guy who's currently running the project. He's cool.

I need an ISA-8 floppy controller. It would be amazing (but by no means likely) to get a 30+mb MFM HDD and ISA-8 controller... I'm working on building a CompactFlash adapter (this thing here) but that project has stalled for a while due to (a) a fairly large mistake I made that will be difficult to work around and (b) the resulting lack of interest.

[RetroTechGuy]

ELKS is very much a work in process. I'm good friends IRL with the guy who's currently running the project. He's cool.

I need an ISA-8 floppy controller. It would be amazing (but by no means likely) to get a 30+mb MFM HDD and ISA-8 controller... I'm working on building a CompactFlash adapter (this thing here) but that project has stalled for a while due to (a) a fairly large mistake I made that will be difficult to work around and (b) the resulting lack of interest.

Y'know, I think that I recently dumped an old MFM I found laying around (I saw one in the last few months, and assume that I tossed it)... Don't recall if it had a controller card wih it... I did a quick poke around, and I still do have various old cards laying around (though I find a lot of crap like low end video or network cards)

I should note that if you're in the UK, shipping from the US will be WAY more than the value of any of the parts...

Maybe you need to layout your own board, and etch it. I can't see it being more than 3 or 4 layers (assuming that its actually more than 2), which could be "kludged" together out of a couple 2-sided boards... If you could find a schematic...

Kepro sells a 2 sided copper board, with a photosensitive coating. You shoot a negative (using a reversed image on transparency paper, through your laser printer), line up your registration marks, and tape it together. Expose to some UV (sunlight) for a few seconds, and "develop" (UV hardens the exposed film, and the developer strips the rest). Get some ferric chloride and agitate...