Phil said:
i have a HP a324y desktop. about a month ago i added a 500gb WD harddrive
along with an existing 40gb WD drive. The 40 gig is jumpered at cs and the
added drive is jumped to the 2nd 2 pins. all worked well. I wanted to upgrade
the memory. The 2 new 512gb memory 1 worked 1 did not. At start up it kept
cycling at startup. To condense the story i replaced the bad pc. When i got
the new stick the computer starts and freezes on hp invent logo. After
playing for some time I removed the 2nd hard drive and all works well. I
called and got the hard drive replace thinking that was the problem. The new
1 also does the same. I tried moving jumpers, and also changed the ribbon
cable. Works well until I plug in the 2nd drive. Any one have any thoughts?
Thank you much.
I can't find that "a324y", so I can't look up the details.
Since the original drive was 40 Gigabytes, it is possible the
computer doesn't support 48 bit LBA or drives over 137GB. This
is just a guess on my part. Actually, there is a way to test
this theory. Find the "jumper table" for the 500GB drive,
and find information on the "32GB clip jumper". It will temporarily
make the drive geometry look like a 32GB hard drive, which keeps
the older computers happy. (This may mean installing two jumpers
on the back of the drive. One jumper selects Master/Slave/CableSelect
while the second jumper causes clipping to 32GB.) If your computer
behaves itself, while the clip jumper is in place on the drive,
then you know what the problem is. The clip jumper may not be
documented on the label of the drive, and you may have to scrounge
around the WD site to find the details. As far as I know, all the
drives I own here, support clipping.
If clipping fixes it, then this is the next step. You'd remove
the clip jumper, and try one of these.
You can try a separate PCI IDE controller. My favorite might be
one of these - a Promise Ultra133 TX2. Promise no longer makes
these, and the PCI IDE controllers on Newegg don't have especially
strong reviews.
(R.I.P. - Promise Ultra133 TX2, PCI IDE controller for up to four drives.
At one time, cards like this were bundled with retail Maxtor hard drives.
Firmware and driver revision should be roughly matched when using these.
An Ultra100 TX2 card can be used in some cases, if you flash upgrade the
BIOS onboard the card. I'd sooner just buy the Ultra133 and use it
without any work at all.)
http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/16-102-007-S03?$S640W$
This is an example of a current generation card. Or rather, what
the manufacturers were able to whip together with what is still
available in the form of IDE chips. You can try this card for $14.
If it doesn't work, send to the landfill... A potential issue with
these might be booting from an optical drive connected to the ITE8212
chip. So this may be used to solve your 500GB problem, but may not
allow you to connect three optical drives and be able to boot
from any one of them. The ITE8212 was used on a few motherboards,
as an IDE controller, and the main issue with its usage, was the
quality of the BIOS/firmware code. And that is likely to be
an issue with just about any of the remaining PCI IDE cards that
you can find new for sale. The Promise was mature some time
ago, which is why I'd recommend buying it, if it was still
manufactured.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124025
Post back how it goes.
HTH,
Paul
