W. eWatson said:
My cable is blue (system), gray (slave) and black (master). So I guess
that a cable select. According to the pdf provided in a post, the
settings should be:
cable select (master?)
n n n n j
n n n n j
Dual(Slave)
n n n j n
n n n j n
When I look at bios, both drives are WD1200JB-00GVA.
However, if I look at the settings, I see:
C- Drive D-Drive
IDE HDD Auto: Press Enter Press Enter
IDE primary: auto auto
access: auto auto
Capacity: 120GB 33822GB !!!! Yes, MB
Cylinders: 57461 65531 !!
Head: 16 16
Precomp: 0 0
Landing zone: 57461 65530
Sectors: 255 63
What's that about??? Defective drive?
I tried a few different jumper settings and either got the OS to
recognize the c-drive, but never the d-drive.
I'm using an ABIT VA-10 MB. Am I flying into a head wind here. The bios
shows IDE on anything to do with the HDDs, and the MB shows IDE marked
on the board connectors. Perhaps this MB doesn't even support drive
select. I can't find my manual now, and the web doesn't show any free
ones. ABIT's site is down. My oh my.
The board has room for two cables and up to four drives. Place
your working device(s) on one cable. Place the suspicious drive
all by itself, on the end of the second cable. Jumper it for
Single Master (probably no jumpers). What does it show in the
BIOS now ? A single drive on the end of the cable, gives the
best signal integrity.
Your results look like perhaps there is data corruption on the cable.
The best kind of wiring for IDE, is the 80 wire cable. The wires
are a little thinner looking than the 40 wire cable. The difference
is, on the 80 wire cable, every second wire is a ground signal,
which controls the impedance better and reduces crosstalk. The introduction
of 80 wire cables is what made the higher Ultra transfer rates work.
And they're recommended for their general goodness. If you're
using 40 wire cables still, pick up a few spares of the 80 wire
cables while you still can.
There is another thing that can influence signal quality, but it
might not be exposed on too many BIOS screens. There is an
IDE "drive strength" setting, with options like "strong" or
"normal" or the like. You really shouldn't play with that.
The setting should be left at the factory default, because
the factory setting is likely to match the normal cable
impedance. You can cause a mismatch by adjusting that setting,
and it is debatable whether such setting should even show
in the BIOS. (They used to do that for AGP as well, but
in that case, there was enough variation between chipsets,
that end users may need to tune it - even if they can't
tell what is going on.)
Paul