The hard drive is getting power, and it sounds like it is spinning up.
I know the IDE controller works because it recognizes the CD drives,
and tech support tells me that if it failed, both primary and
secondary IDE would go out. Not sure what you mean by boot
configuration. I can't select a hard drive in the boot sequence,
because it doesn't recognize that one is connected.
Have you read the manual about the "IDE Operate Mode". There
are two PATA connectors on the motherboard, driven by the
Southbridge. The two PATA connectors can take four devices.
There are also two SATA connectors on the Intel Southbridge,
and these can be operated in RAID or non-RAID mode, if the
Southbridge is a ICH5R.
Now, for legacy MS OSes, the OS is hardwired for specific I/O
addresses and IRQs for the primary and secondary PATA interfaces.
What Intel did, was provide an option, where, for a legacy OS,
any two pair of the three possible pair of disks, can be mapped
to the fixed locations that a legacy OS expects. That means, for
example, if you have Win98SE, you could have two disks on Primary
PATA and two disks on SATA, and when the OS sees them, it thinks
there are four disks on two PATA interfaces. The Secondary PATA
simply cannot be see by the OS, in that legacy mode. It is not
mapped to anything Win98SE can understand. The remapping in the
Southbridge fixes up the other four disks. That is how the
"SATA driver" problem is solved for an old OS like Win98SE.
When you use an OS like Win2K or WinXP, then all six disks on the
Southbridge can be used at the same time. This requires the
"Enhanced" setting, as shown below. The six disks are mapped in
this case to appear on the PCI bus, and are enumerated differently
than they would be in Win98SE. Since all six disks are available,
the "Enhanced Mode Support" is kind of a bogus selector (i.e. we're
no longer selecting four of six disks, as all six can be used). The
setting should be set to S-ATA, even if you don't have or plan to
use S-ATA drives. Setting "Enhanced Mode Support" to anything else,
while in Enhanced mode, generally results in slow disk performance,
but I've never hear of your symptoms (disappearing disks) in
Enhanced mode before.
Onboard IDE Operate Mode [Enhanced] <--- Main:Ide Configuration
Enhanced Mode Support on [S-ATA]
Configure S-ATA as RAID [No]
The above settings are suitable for six disks, in a no-RAID config,
connected to the Southbridge. You can still use whatever Promise
controller is on the board independent of this issue.
HTH,
Paul
Encryption =---
