rumblestrip said:
Hi. Does this motherboard often have faulty ide ports?
Are there funky new cables I'm supposed to be using?
Nothing I'M doing seems to get this homebuilt new thang a-workin'.
The pc checks the bios and al that but the things supposedley getting
power from the two ports are doa.
Just wanted contrasting perspectives before the replacement drive
arrives Monday.
The disk drive has a power cable and a data cable. Make sure the
disk has power. You should hear the sound of the platters spinning
when the computer is powered.
There are a couple pictures on this page you can use as a reference,
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/famiDocument?dlc=&lc=en&product=12455&cc=us&docname=bph07146
The disk has to have a jumper installed in the correct position.
You can use the master setting for a disk plugged to the end of
the IDE cable. If using one drive only on an IDE cable, you fill
the end position first. If adding a second device to the cable,
it goes to the middle connector, and is jumpered as slave.
SATA doesn't have the same jumpering options. There is one disk
per cable, so it is implicitly the "master" of its own fate.
But SATA drives do come in two cable speeds, either 1.5Gb/sec or
3.0Gb/sec. Older chipsets only support 1.5Gb/sec and when a
drive ships from the factory, it is usually set to 1.5Gb/sec.
The label of the drive should contain any other necessary
details. Fiddling with spread spectrum on the drive, can
effectively be ignored (just leave it the way it shipped).
For the most part, you should be able to plug SATA power
and data connectors and the drive should just work.
The BIOS screen should show the drive positions in a detection
table, that you may see flash by. If you see the drive brand
or model number listed, that means the drive is being seen
and detected. If nothing is showing, then something must be
wrong with the cabling, or with the jumpering. Some companies
plug actual hardware into the motherboard and boot it before
it ships, so most of the boards should work. If the motherboard just
showed a black screen, then the processor is likely not working
yet. Since you are getting a BIOS screen, many pieces of hardware
on the board are working, so I wouldn't give up yet. And
since the BIOS screen is showing up, that means the motherboard
two power connectors must also have got connected correctly.
Here is a sample screen with two drives detected - a Maxtor
hard drive as master and a Sony CDROM as slave:
http://www.databe.com/boot.gif
You may want to enter the BIOS and set the boot order. I use floppy
first, then CD, then hard drive. That allows booting a DOS floppy
if needed. Or if the floppy drive is empty, it would boot from the
Windows Install CD. And when the Windows Install CD is ejected
after the last stage of the install, then the hard drive should be
selected as the boot target.
Paul
