sandeep

Hey folks, it's me (again) looking for a bit of advice.

I can't help myself. this place has so many heads full of info that I can't stand passing up asking questions.


Here's the deal. For a few weeks now, I think something is wrong with my mainboard. I have four IDE devices. Three harddrives and a CDRW drive. I can't get more than three at a time to work. I've tried various combinations of master/slave settings on both the controllers with three different IDE cables, but I can't put my finger on where the problem lies.

Is there a piece of software that could diagnose any problems with the hardware? Even stuff that runs before booting windows.

I've been in the market for a PCI IDE controller for a while now, because I have two more harddrives just sitting around that I can't use. I've been putting off buying one, but now it seems that i have no choice.

Before i went and spend money on something that I didn't want to buy just yet, I wanted to see if i could figure out what exact what wrong.


Any help or opinions would be appriciated. thanks.

chodarama

1 Do all the devices actually work?
2 Try another IDE cable. Sometimes a cable will be pinched on the edge.
3 Update your bios. Are the drives all ATA33, ATA66, etc? Some mobos don't support all drives.

List the specs of these drives, and at least the model numbers. Also, the mobo model and a link to its specs.

sandeep

It's an ECS K7S5a board
http://www.ecsusa.com/products/k7s5a_v3.html

All of the drives worked fine for a long time. I've tried cycling in a third IDE cable, but still no luck.

Each of the drives works at one point or another, but I just can't have both controllers running two devices each.
I can't recall when this first started, so I can't tell you if I did anything.

the drives are all fairly new. Two WD disks, an 80 and a 120 GB. and a 20GB maxtor, which have all been working fine. the CDRW is a LiteOn 40x12x48


When I have three devices running, it'll be fine, but when I shut down and plug in the second device on the cable that has only one device, and boot up, it'll fail to recognize the entire cable.
I've been trying different combinations of 1 and 2 devices on the various controllers, and combinations of the two, but can only see that pattern arising.

The bios is set to auto recognize the devices, and the drives are all on Cable Select.


The weird thing is, this config has been working fine for months, without a single problem. I have a feeling it's one of the controllers, because of the fact that I can repeat the results so readily.


For me, it's a real head scratcher, and more annoying than anything else.

Peetster

1. Does BIOS see all four devices?
When you boot up, watch the BIOS output. If it doesn't see all four devices, then your OS never will.

2. Warm boot your computer.
This is especially true with CS. Hook up all four devices, turn on the computer, then ctl-alt-del after the BIOS loads and before the OS loads.

3. Don't use CS.
Set your masters to master and your slaves to slave. Don't use auto detect in BIOS, go to "Detect IDE devices" and accept what it finds.

After that, you are probably right about the controller being bad. I hope this helps.

junglistic

Could it maybe be an issue of power consumption.
How old is the power supply?