No boot with two IDE HDs????!!!

Lmandrake · Post by **Lmandrake** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 10:03 am

My girlfriend's PC is getting to be like an old car you just keep throwing money into...

Anyway it has Tyan Tomcat 845 mainboard and after her old 80 gb drive started to die I replaced it with a wd 160 gb drive. She wanted to have a second HD to backup to so I got a 120 gb seagate. Here is where the strangeness starts. Install the seagate as slave to the wd. Both drives jumpered to cable select. System starts to boot, detects both drives and then hangs. System will boot with either drive installed alone, but not both together.
Tried a new IDE cable, no change. Even when one drive of the two is disabled in the bios, system will not boot with both drives.

Any thoughts or suggestions would certainly be appreciated.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 10:07 am

I've found cable select to be an unpredictable beast. Try setting up the C drive as the master & the other as slave & vice-versa if necessary.

nitro237 · Post by **nitro237** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 12:33 pm

normalicy wrote:I've found cable select to be an unpredictable beast. Try setting up the C drive as the master & the other as slave & vice-versa if necessary.

I agree. I would set the jumpers on the hard drives to master and slave and try it.

canton_kid · Post by **canton_kid** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 4:02 pm

nitro237 wrote:I agree. I would set the jumpers on the hard drives to master and slave and try it.

Me 3

I remember having various problems with cable select also, I stopped using it and just always set the jumpers as needed.

Also, I had troubles with WD jumper settings before. As I recall WD had a jumper for Master Single Drive, and Master Slave Present and Slave. If I used the WD as a Master drive then added or removed the slave drive without changing the WD jumper the drive would not boot. One of the reason I seldom used WD Ide drives and preffered the Maxtors.
With Maxtor I just set the jumper to Master and then I could add or remove the slave drive as I wanted and it did not matter, the Maxtor would always boot fine with or without that second drive installed and no changing jumpers!

With WD it was always a problem trying to move the tiny jumper inside the case and most the time I'd have to pull the drive out to change it, just because I decided I wanted to read a second slave drive or wanted to take out the slave drive to read in another system.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 6:24 pm

canton_kid, needle nose pliers certainly help with the jumper changing

Cable select as mentioned does seem to have some issues at times. WD drives and Seagate drives have to be jumpered just right together or they might not place nice.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 8:17 pm

I wouldn't use anything but cable select on a modern mobo, but since this is an older one then yeah you may need to use master & slave. Be aware some drives have a different jumper setting for master: "Master" or "Master with Slave"

canton_kid · Post by **canton_kid** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 9:11 pm

ZYFER wrote:canton_kid, needle nose pliers certainly help with the jumper changing

Cable select as mentioned does seem to have some issues at times. WD drives and Seagate drives have to be jumpered just right together or they might not place nice.

Yep, but in a tight place or if you need to look at the chart to see which pins to use pliers don't do allot. LOL

Nice thing about Sata drives I guess is no jumpers to worry about.

I think they are going a bit far with the jumperless system boards though! My new gigabyte board did not come with a Bios reset jumper. I got the pins to jumper but no jumper itself for the pins. LOL

Lmandrake · Post by **Lmandrake** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 5:57 am

Unless I failed to set the jumpers correctly - and I was being pretty careful - it does not matter if I do cable select or set one to master and the other to slave with jumpers.

And my earlier description was incorrect. The machine will boot - eventually.
It hangs for a minute or two right after listing all the IDE drives in the boot screen. So it is detecting them fine, but then seems to have an issue.

Board has the latest bios (2005!).

However, when it does the only drive it "sees" is the Seagate. I booted BARTPE, Seagate drive tools and Acronis from three different CD's and in each instance only the Seagate was detected.

I guess it is time to shop for a USB enclosure for the Seagate...

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 8:40 am

Still sounds like a Master/Slave issue to me. Like it has been said, WD drives in particular are picky with the setting & I've had to do some odd combinations at times to get them to work with other brands (one on Master with slave present, the other CS or one in master without slave & the other as a slave anyhow). It's a pain, however, I've eventually made every drive work. Sometimes it's easier to put one hard drive on each IDE channel if there's too much trouble & just have a CD drive/ Hard drive one each one.

eGoCeNTRoNiX · Post by **eGoCeNTRoNiX** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 9:46 am

normalicy wrote:Sometimes it's easier to put one hard drive on each IDE channel if there's too much trouble & just have a CD drive/ Hard drive one each one.

I was under the impression that this was the best way to have two hard drives in one PC?

eGo

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 10:15 am

Actually, it's probably better to have one one each channel anyhow since hard drives use more bandwidth than CD/DVD drives. It would spread the load a bit. The days of worries about which is on what channel is mostly moot. It wouldn't hurt to put the drive you use for cache on recorded media on a seperate channel from the DVD/CD burner, but I've had no issues with them both being on the same channel all the same.

Lmandrake · Post by **Lmandrake** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 10:19 am

Unfortunately, this case is tight and there is no way to put a HD and CD on the same channel unless I found IDE cables with a lot of space between the two HD connectors.

eGoCeNTRoNiX · Post by **eGoCeNTRoNiX** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 10:40 am

You might try to find some 36" round cables.. I have some here at the office that have 18" between connectors

eGo

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 10:48 am

Do you have ONLY the IDE channels you're using enabled in BIOS? If you have all 4 channels enabled then the long pause could be due to the BIOS scanning for drives on unconnected channels.