[Head Creep]

Alright, let me set this up. My motherboard has a built-in Serial ATA and IDE controller. I initially had one hard drive connected through SATA, and two CD/DVD drives connected to one IDE channel (I hope that's the correct term). A few days ago, I bought and installed a second hard drive, IDE, and connected it to its own channel. Windows XP recognizes the drive and allows full reading and writing on it (I even copied over 100+ gigs of files to it and, earlier today, listened to music located on it for about 2 hours), but during start-up, it says it cannot install two IDE channels. After a random period of time, the hard drive will just mysteriously disappear from My Computer, and won't come back until the computer is restarted.

I've installed new drivers for the motherboard and checked all the BIOS settings, and everything is where it should be. As of right now, the only thing I haven't checked is the jumpers on the hard drive, but I doubt that would make any difference. So my question is, what's going on, and how do I fix it?

 

[Uncle Erik]

Yes, the jumpers on the drive do make a difference. I'm not familiar with XP, but if you have two "master" drives, you're usually asking for trouble.

If you're not sure of the correct jumper settings, you should be able to pull the manuals off the Internet.

 

[c0mfortably_numb]

Yep first place to start is looking at your IDE devices, and if need be go to the manufactures web site to get the pin out for the jumpers. There is usally three different configs for IDE SLAVE, MASTER, & CABLE SELECT.... If useing 2 IDE's on one channel One must be master and the other must be slave(I can imagine the replies this may generate)

LOL

Also once you do that go into your bios usally when booting hit dele to get into the bios and make sure the bios is reporting the drives as master and slave. Once you get it set correctly, you shouldn't have any other problems.

..::EDIT::..
Also what chipset is your motherboard and what brand hard drive? I forgot to mention that Maxtor has had compatibility issues with NForce4 based motherboards.

 

[MD1032]

most MOBOS will control the master by themselves. That is, the top drive will be the master and the bottom the slave, and you need to set both drives to cable select in order to work.

 

[Head Creep]

Quote:

Originally Posted by c0mfortably_numb Yep first place to start is looking at your IDE devices, and if need be go to the manufactures web site to get the pin out for the jumpers. There is usally three different configs for IDE SLAVE, MASTER, & CABLE SELECT.... If useing 2 IDE's on one channel One must be master and the other must be slave(I can imagine the replies this may generate) LOL

I just checked, and the IDE hard drive is set to slave. It seems a little far fetched that changing the jumper settings on one drive on one channel would correct a problem that seems to be plaguing both channels. But I guess it's worth a shot.

Also, I decided to run an experiment and turn off all power management settings for the hard drives today, and the new drive is still working fine after over 6 hours of idling. So, it seems that when the drive spins down, Windows loses sight of it. The plot thickens...

Edit: The motherboard is an ABIT with an Intel 875P chipset. And just to clarify things, the main hard drive is Serial ATA, running on a completely different controller. The new hard drive is on its own IDE channel.

 

[c0mfortably_numb]

Oops I totally misread the thread I think...I'm sorry I thought we were talking about 2 drives on one channel....

In the case of the SATA going out of sight on spin down, I am thinking it is a driver issue for the controller. You may want to go to Intel's site and look for a new driver for the SATA controller, and also update the board drivers to the currents ones on the site and see if that corrects the problem.

 

[Head Creep]

It's the IDE drive that's having problems, not the SATA drive. The SATA drive has been going strong for 2 years now without any problems. And I've already installed the newest drivers, with no luck.