Problem with IDE hard disk on ASUS motherboard P2B-DS

  • Thread starter Thread starter bvkiran
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bvkiran

I moved a hard disk from one m/c running AMD to another on a P2B-DS
motherboard. I connected the power and the IDE1 connector to the hard
disk.
CMOS Autodetect detects the hard disk and says the right size of the
disk but different cylinders etc.


Save CMOS and restart the hard disk with the WinXP OS does not boot
up. Just freezes and sits there.
Display on the screen reports a crazy disk size.

What could be wrong. Please help.
 
What could be wrong? You just listed the things that are wrong.

When you put a disc drive in a computer the geometry settings must match the
drive or you will get errors. On all modern motherboards, the custom is to
always use the Auto setting. Old systems do not have Auto and had to have
cylinder / head / sector etc. (CHS) set manually.

By allowing the computer to try to boot with conflicting CHS settings, you
have also probably allowed it to write to the disc using those settings.
This has probably corrupted the disc.

The disc geometry is used in determining where on the physical disc blocks
are read from or written to. When a disc is used at a specific setting, then
all calculations that go from Logical disc addresses (in the OS) to CHS (or
LBA) use these parameters to work out which CHS is asked for on the drive,
so if the CHS are changed then the resulting request to the drive changes
and so becomes wrong.

Unfortunately, the IDE standard says something along the lines of disc
drives accepting whatever parameters they are given - some drives will
supposedly default to the correct settings if the values that they are asked
to use are wrong, but this is not a requirement :(

If you were trying to use this drive as a boot disc, then you are out of
luck on that front too as the two systems are extremely different: AMD ->
Intel to start with. Under XP you would *have* to do a Repair (or new)
install to be able to boot the OS on the disc, followed by installation of
motherboard and other drivers, critical updates and patches etc.

At this point, I would expect the drive to be corrupt.

- Tim
 
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