I sent this some hours ago from the wrong identity so it went into the Moderator queue. It has not yet appeared on the list so I'm sending it again. If the other one appears then I apologise for the duplication.
On 15/02/07 22:49:31, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
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
Mistake? Moi?
No - the settings for both drives haven't changed. One is set to master and the other to slave. They work perfectly on my old machine and they work perfectly on the Asus provided they are connected to the Intel IDE interface and not the JMicron.
Are you sure your cables are good ?
Well I'm still using the same cable (on my old machine at the moment) which I was also using on the Asus (Intel) and I haven't, yet, had any other problems.
Are they the proper UDMA spec 80 conductor cables ?
Pass! How do I tell? Why should there be 80 cables when there are only 40 pins?
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.
What do regard as perfect? No sharp bends, no bends at all, no fraying?
Thank goodness you backed up huh
I've adopted the belt and braces approach. I have had a SCSI DAT drive for many years now, not the same one as they seem to fail regularly, but in the recent past I bought another IDE drive to mirror (not raid) my main drive on the assumption that should the main drive fail I just swap drives and continue on my merry way.
I have seen many comments on the Internet that using a second drive is the cheapest way of keeping a backup these days. If I'd relied on that idea I wouldn't have had anything to restore.