Excelsor Drive Problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lokai
  • Start date Start date
L

Lokai

Hello All

I have installed an 80Gb Exelsor (ATA100, 7200 rpm) drive on my system:

AMD XP 2500+ (Barton)
512Mb RAM, HDD - 120Gb (ATA-133, 7200rpm)
Motherboard ASUS A7N8X 2.0 With Pheonix Award BIOS v6.0
Window XP Home (current with updates)

The system performed normally before I installed the drive but after
installing I had a number of problems:

1. The System seemed to slow down - it would take almost 2 mins to load up.
2. In BIOS I do not see any recognisable description for the drive unlike
with my Maxtor drive which I see in English for its description. What I see
for the Excelsor drive is almost hyeroglyphcial.
3. It does not show the correct encoding for the drive size: its show 23468
Mb when it should say something like 80 Gb.

I have the drive set-up as a secondary (Slave) drive and Windows appears to
see it as a 'F' drive but the is about it. Windows Will not write to it
(registering an I/O error whenever I try to) and the system all but hangs
when I try to do anything with the drive.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can get around this or is there something
that I am missing?

Many thanks in advance

L
 
What IDE device do you have as the Master on the secondary port?

IIRC, a hard drive will not operate correctly as a slave if there is no
master drive present, or if an ATAPI device (CD,CD-R/W,DVD) is the master.
There must be a Hard drive connected as Master for another HD to work as a
Slave.

John S.
 
Muttley said:
What IDE device do you have as the Master on the secondary port?

IIRC, a hard drive will not operate correctly as a slave if there is no
master drive present, or if an ATAPI device (CD,CD-R/W,DVD) is the master.
There must be a Hard drive connected as Master for another HD to work as a
Slave.
Clueless.


John S.
Click to expand...
 
Doh, don't I feel like a fool............

My apologies, my previous post was in error.

I have since found out that these restrictions do not apply to the UDMA
drives and UDMA EIDE controllers used in todays systems.

(It did happen to me ages ago when using a Pentium system with PIO mode
drives though.)

Again, My apologies,

John S.
 
Check that the jumper settings on your drives are correct.
The only time I recall seeing weird behaviour like you describe during drive
detection, was when the drives were not correctly jumpered.
ie: Both of the drives on the one channel cable were jumpered as Master,
both were jumpered as Slave or one drive has the jumper missing.

Going by my previous post though, I'm probably wrong anyway..... :-(

John S.
 
Muttley said:
Doh, don't I feel like a fool............

My apologies, my previous post was in error.

I have since found out that these restrictions do not apply to the UDMA
drives and UDMA EIDE controllers used in todays systems.
Click to expand...

And not to the ones before_those either.
(It did happen to me ages ago when using a Pentium system with PIO mode
drives though.)

Again, My apologies,

John S.
Click to expand...

[snip]
 
Ok.

So, If it really doesn't matter at all :-

1) Why do PC hardware guides (Books, Internet, Magazines) bother to say that
a single HD should be jumpered as Master with no slave? (Most hard-drive
manufacturers also state this in their installation guides.)

2) Why do they say that the HD should be the master drive when sharing a
channel with an ATAPI device?

John S.

Folkert Rienstra said:
And not to the ones before_those either.
Click to expand...
<snip>
 
Ok.
Click to expand...
So, If it really doesn't matter at all :-
Click to expand...

No one said that. Just that the 'problem' was
only seen with what are now very elderly drives.
1) Why do PC hardware guides (Books, Internet,
Magazines) bother to say that a single HD should
be jumpered as Master with no slave?
Click to expand...

Most drives dont even have a jumper config
like that, most obviously with cdrom drives.

The reason its commonly stated is just because most
keep mindlessly repeating what's been said in the past
without continuously updating what's said, particularly
when what's said still works. Doesnt mean its essential tho.
(Most hard-drive manufacturers also
state this in their installation guides.)
Click to expand...

Basically they state what works, and you're assuming that
they intend to say that its the only acceptible config when its not.
2) Why do they say that the HD should be the master
drive when sharing a channel with an ATAPI device?
Click to expand...

They dont.

And when that is said, its because it
used to matter and doesnt anymore.
 
Muttley said:
Ok.

So, If it really doesn't matter at all :-
Click to expand...

I said that?
1) Why do PC hardware guides (Books, Internet, Magazines) bother to say that
a single HD should be jumpered as Master with no slave? (Most hard-drive
manufacturers also state this in their installation guides.)
Click to expand...

How does that change what you said?
And how about drives that don't have such a setting or drives that have
it but where it means quite a different thing, as with IBM (or Maxtor,
or Seagate). Only WD appear to have such a setting that you speak of.
2) Why do they say that the HD should be the master drive when sharing
a channel with an ATAPI device?
Click to expand...

Because ATAPI devices usually are CD-Rom devices and -because of the
price competition- are lacking in supporting slave devices or working as
a slave device. That is what the "with slave present" is usually about.

There are other (practical) reasons as well since some older bioses refuse
to boot from slaves.
 
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