Failure of IDE controllers on ASUS P4 motherboards.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sylvain VAN DER WALDE
  • Start date Start date
S

Sylvain VAN DER WALDE

Hello all.
My first post, but I've been reading this newsgroup for some months.
I had an ASUS P4R800-VM motherboard, on which the Primary IDE controller
stopped working. I tried everything I could think of to get it going
(unsuccessfully), and finally bought a PCI IDE card which put matters right.

I've since upgraded to a P4C800-E de luxe motherboard which worked okay in
its original midi tower case.

But since upgrading the case (Enermax CA3030), and the power supply (Antec
450W SmartPower 2.0), I find now that the Secondary IDE controller is not
working (connected to a CDROM burner and DVDROM burner). I've yet to fit the
PCI IDE
controller card, but I'm optimistic that it "will do the trick").

I there a weakness in these ASUS motherboard IDE controllers? I would
welcome your experiences on this matter.

A little useful tip if you get an Enermax CA3030 midi tower case: I
struggled for a fairly long time trying to fit the Input/Ouput plate to that
case. To cut a long story short, the 120 cm rear fan was in the way. I had
to slacken the mounting screws (the fan housing is mounted about 1/2 mm too
far to the rear) and that plate then went in without further trouble.

Sylvain.
 
"Sylvain VAN DER said:
Hello all.
My first post, but I've been reading this newsgroup for some months.
I had an ASUS P4R800-VM motherboard, on which the Primary IDE controller
stopped working. I tried everything I could think of to get it going
(unsuccessfully), and finally bought a PCI IDE card which put matters right.

I've since upgraded to a P4C800-E de luxe motherboard which worked okay in
its original midi tower case.

But since upgrading the case (Enermax CA3030), and the power supply (Antec
450W SmartPower 2.0), I find now that the Secondary IDE controller is not
working (connected to a CDROM burner and DVDROM burner). I've yet to fit the
PCI IDE
controller card, but I'm optimistic that it "will do the trick").

I there a weakness in these ASUS motherboard IDE controllers? I would
welcome your experiences on this matter.

A little useful tip if you get an Enermax CA3030 midi tower case: I
struggled for a fairly long time trying to fit the Input/Ouput plate to that
case. To cut a long story short, the 120 cm rear fan was in the way. I had
to slacken the mounting screws (the fan housing is mounted about 1/2 mm too
far to the rear) and that plate then went in without further trouble.

Sylvain.
Click to expand...

By any chance, are any of your hard drives or CD/DVD drives from
the old computer, being used on the P4C800-E Deluxe ?

Perhaps one of those devices is actually damaging the interfaces
it is connected to.

A second possibility, would be a bad cable doing some damage.

A third possibility, would be an extra standoff underneath the
motherboard, touching a copper track on the IDE interface.

Since the chipsets you have damaged, are made by different
companies (ATI in the first case, Intel in the second), I doubt
this is a "weakness" as you describe it. Either a hard drive or
a CD/DVD drive, must be doing this, by heavily loading a signal
on the interface.

I cannot honestly say, what would constitute a good test for a
problem like that. Presumably you could measure the resistance
between each logic signal and its neighbours (i.e. to check for
shorts between adjacent signals), or between a logic signal and
the power rails (VCC or GND). But in the second case, I don't know
what threshold value to use for the good vs bad case. (I'd have
to dig up a copy of the ATA/ATAPI spec, and find out what level
of current sink/source they use, to estimate what a dangerous
level of loading would be - about 3x the normal drive level
could cause a driver to fail in a matter of days, if all the
drivers were loaded to that level.)

Since you don't describe a problem getting data off the drives,
just before the failure happened, the logic signal having the
problem must be some kind of control signal. That would be my
best guess.

You can also damage intefaces with static electricity, or
perhaps by attempting to plug the drives in "hot", to a powered
system. Always switch off and unplug the computer, before working
inside, to ensure that there are no stray voltages present when
adding or removing components - that is a conservative policy to
avoid problems that could result from touching something that
still has +5VSB on it. RAM is an example of a component where
the DIMM socket continues to receive power, if +5VSB is present.

Paul
 
Back
Top