[ALUG] Re: Asus P5W DH Deluxe mainboard and IDE interfaces

[Wayne Stallwood]

On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 21:43 +0000, Barry Samuels wrote:
> They are shown, briefly for about 5 seconds, just before entering
> the  
> BIOS and it was here that I noticed that only one hard drive was
> shown  
> after the heading 'HDD:' but the name that followed was just a
> random  
> collection of letters and numbers, the font was also broken up  
> (characters had gaps in them), and that line of text was flashing.

I have had that before.

Apart from possibly having a broken IDE controller there, I'd suggest
two other possible causes.

Either a mistake was made on setting the master/slave jumpers so that
both drives appeared as one or 

Are you sure your cables are good ?

Are they the proper UDMA spec 80 conductor cables ? Interfaces should
fall back to < UDMA mode 2 but they detect this by looking at signalling
errors on the interface so the detection of a 40 conductor cable is not
100% guarantied (I have even seen vice versa where an interface insists
that it has a 40 conductor cable when it really has an 80 conductor one)

Also the 80 conductor cables are much more fragile than the old 40
conductor ones...Having learnt the hard way (and given the insignificant
cost) I tend to replace any that look anything less than perfect on
machines that pass through me as a matter of course.

Thank goodness you backed up huh