Quirky Booting . . .

[Brangwen]

Fellow Members:

Very strange. I'm working on a friend's system. On a cold boot the generic MB does not detect the Secondary Devices (CDRW and IBM HDD). If I CONT/ALT/DEL and reboot, the disks are detected. Could I have a bad IDE cable? Any thoughts? What else could it be? Controller?

Thx.

Brangwen

[DallasDon]

Judging from your post count, I assume you have checked the Jumpers, etc.

Blue end of the cable to the mobo, slave drive in the middle, master on the end.

You might try entering the Standard CMOS Features, auto decect drives, and see if they are correctly listed. Then save (probably F10) and exit.

[Brangwen]

DallasDon:

Yes: correctly cabled, jumped, devices are listed.

Here's something interesting:

There are two IDE cables with dual connectors. I switched them back and forth - maybe both are bad? Not very likely . . .

The Master is connected to the CDRW; the slave is connected to the IBM HDD. Again both are jumpered accordingly.

I discovered that the CDRW works fine without the IBM HDD connected. Hmm. No funny noises, e.g. clicking ... maybe full scan?

Also I noticed an "error" message in BIOS. When I play around in there - just reconfirming the settings and F10 - it works after about the fourth try (on the last re-boot).

Interesting . . .

Thx.

Brangwen

Note: IBM is a 30GB 7200RPM . . . never a problem.

[John Prophet]

did he just add a drive or change anything?? or did it just all of a sudden start messing up??

if he just added something Id have to guess that it is somehow jumpered wrong.

maybe try it with everything jumpered to "cable select"??

[Brangwen]

John:

The computer boots fine and devices are detected when HDD "removed." I'm going to "remove" the optical and master the HDD.

Why cable select? Do all devices have that feature?

Thx.

Brangwen