I'm not a big fan of jumpering drives as Cable Select. After waaay to long on the phone with someone, I had them bring their computer (Dell Dimension 4300, 80MB WD on the first IDE channnel). Here's the situation:
Friend wanted to upgrade the current 5400 40MB WD drive. Bought a WD800JB 80GB and installed right out of the box on same 80-conductor cable as the first drive. W2K could not find. Didn't check BIOS - just hoped it might work. No POST error noted when booting.
The new 80MB drive came factory jumpered as Cable Select [all new WD's and Maxtors do now, I think] and that's how he installed, hoping it would work. Does not remember how original 40MB drive was jumpered. He didn't change the existing 40MB drive's jumpers because he had no idea what to change them to. He couldn't see label hidden by part of the case, and didn't care to yank drive. [The two drives actually use the same WD 10-pin jumpering scheme in his case] Didn't want to put the new drive on second IDE cable because CDROM would limit transfer speeds. Reasonable series of actions so far - I expect 'most' upgrades start like this.
Decides 'old' 40MB isn't that important for now and is interfering somehow. He will just put in the 80MB by itself on the cable and load O/S, eventually adding 40MB later as second drive on cable. Yanks 40MB, boots and gets (at POST) "Primary Hard Disk 0 Not Found; Primary Hard Disk 1 Not Found". Gets option to go into BIOS (whatever that is) and sees a line that says "Primary Drive 0.............unknown device" and same for drive 1.
Calls me. I tell him the cable select [CS] jumpering makes the drive dependent on which position it uses on the cable. He has it on the connector closest to the motherboard = slave position. I say just to set it as 'Master' for now to see if it's recognized in the BIOS.
Calls later and says it started to work, but he's having a lot of troubles getting W2K working right after installing it. After a few days of going back and forth on the phone, he remarks that he keeps getting a POST error when booting about "unrecognized drive" on every boot - but he's been ignoring it because the drive seems to be working. I take one last drag off of my cigarette, flick the butt at the sleeping cat sending it about five feet into the air, and ask my friend to bring the computer in. Odd, because I don't smoke and I've never owned a cat, but I digress...
Turns out that he never jumpered the drive as Master. He *was* paying attention when I was talking about the cable position thing and moved the drive over to the outside connector which made it (as far as Cable Select was concerned) the Master. Unfortunately, it booted through the 'unrecognized drive' error message. He was able to run the W2K install CD, partition/format the drive and complete the install process.
Observation: CS does not work for a single drive/80-conductor cable/Dell Dim 4300. It will not work at *all* (BIOS & O/S) if it's connected to the middle (Slave) connector on the cable by itself. It will seem to work (POST warning only) if it's on the outside (Master) connector. NT/2K/XP generally ignore the BIOS - they can still see the drive in this situation even though it can't be recognized by the BIOS. If you manage to get W2K loaded, the result is an extremely unstable system.
Symptoms were mainly IDE interface errors as well as many sector-level disk errors. 2K and XP will slow down the IDE speed if they see too many errors at the interface level - his was running at 33MHz even though it *should* have been running at 100MHz on the Dell mobo. (2K SP6 so this is *not* the SP3 UDMA fix).
I also suspect the SMART tasks the disk was performing were not being recognized by W2K resulting in IDE conflicts/errors. It was previously reported on this forum (sorry - forgot original poster) that SMART operations are forced active for the first XX number of drive spinups, even if you've disabled SMART monitoring. Perhaps the drive not being recognized in the BIOS causes W2K to (attempt to) dump data to the disk in the middle of the disk's SMART checking - not sure and no way to test. He was ready to RMA this drive because it must have been another 'bad' WD.
Whatever the underlying cause, ALL problems have been resolved by re-jumpering the drive to Master, zero-filling/sector recovery, repartitioning/reformatting and reloading. The drive interface is now at the 100MHz speed as it should be and has not coughed up a single error. The old 40MB drive was added to the cable jumpered as a Slave. The machine can now dual-boot to either drive's copy of W2K independently of the other. Everything else working OK, but the cat is still kind of upset.
All this pain could have been avoided if the drives were configured as Master/Slave to begin with. Cable select is a great idea if it would have ever been implemented in the industry consistently. It positively *will* work when properly configured. I know it will also work for a single drive on certain motherboard/drive combinations. This is just one example of a combination that CS will *not* work for a single drive on a single cable - I would guess there are many others.
If you always want to be sure, use Master/Slave. If Cable Select is working OK for you right now, then don't change a thing - it's configured properly.
Anyone else have a similarly (mis)configured system - CS on only one drive / BIOS can't recognize drive / NT-2K-XP can recognize and use? It would be interesting to see if there are any patterns by motherboard or drive. I guess it would also be good to know cases were it *was* working properly.
I'll write up a FAQ if we collect enough information.
Friend wanted to upgrade the current 5400 40MB WD drive. Bought a WD800JB 80GB and installed right out of the box on same 80-conductor cable as the first drive. W2K could not find. Didn't check BIOS - just hoped it might work. No POST error noted when booting.
The new 80MB drive came factory jumpered as Cable Select [all new WD's and Maxtors do now, I think] and that's how he installed, hoping it would work. Does not remember how original 40MB drive was jumpered. He didn't change the existing 40MB drive's jumpers because he had no idea what to change them to. He couldn't see label hidden by part of the case, and didn't care to yank drive. [The two drives actually use the same WD 10-pin jumpering scheme in his case] Didn't want to put the new drive on second IDE cable because CDROM would limit transfer speeds. Reasonable series of actions so far - I expect 'most' upgrades start like this.
Decides 'old' 40MB isn't that important for now and is interfering somehow. He will just put in the 80MB by itself on the cable and load O/S, eventually adding 40MB later as second drive on cable. Yanks 40MB, boots and gets (at POST) "Primary Hard Disk 0 Not Found; Primary Hard Disk 1 Not Found". Gets option to go into BIOS (whatever that is) and sees a line that says "Primary Drive 0.............unknown device" and same for drive 1.
Calls me. I tell him the cable select [CS] jumpering makes the drive dependent on which position it uses on the cable. He has it on the connector closest to the motherboard = slave position. I say just to set it as 'Master' for now to see if it's recognized in the BIOS.
Calls later and says it started to work, but he's having a lot of troubles getting W2K working right after installing it. After a few days of going back and forth on the phone, he remarks that he keeps getting a POST error when booting about "unrecognized drive" on every boot - but he's been ignoring it because the drive seems to be working. I take one last drag off of my cigarette, flick the butt at the sleeping cat sending it about five feet into the air, and ask my friend to bring the computer in. Odd, because I don't smoke and I've never owned a cat, but I digress...
Turns out that he never jumpered the drive as Master. He *was* paying attention when I was talking about the cable position thing and moved the drive over to the outside connector which made it (as far as Cable Select was concerned) the Master. Unfortunately, it booted through the 'unrecognized drive' error message. He was able to run the W2K install CD, partition/format the drive and complete the install process.
Observation: CS does not work for a single drive/80-conductor cable/Dell Dim 4300. It will not work at *all* (BIOS & O/S) if it's connected to the middle (Slave) connector on the cable by itself. It will seem to work (POST warning only) if it's on the outside (Master) connector. NT/2K/XP generally ignore the BIOS - they can still see the drive in this situation even though it can't be recognized by the BIOS. If you manage to get W2K loaded, the result is an extremely unstable system.
Symptoms were mainly IDE interface errors as well as many sector-level disk errors. 2K and XP will slow down the IDE speed if they see too many errors at the interface level - his was running at 33MHz even though it *should* have been running at 100MHz on the Dell mobo. (2K SP6 so this is *not* the SP3 UDMA fix).
I also suspect the SMART tasks the disk was performing were not being recognized by W2K resulting in IDE conflicts/errors. It was previously reported on this forum (sorry - forgot original poster) that SMART operations are forced active for the first XX number of drive spinups, even if you've disabled SMART monitoring. Perhaps the drive not being recognized in the BIOS causes W2K to (attempt to) dump data to the disk in the middle of the disk's SMART checking - not sure and no way to test. He was ready to RMA this drive because it must have been another 'bad' WD.
Whatever the underlying cause, ALL problems have been resolved by re-jumpering the drive to Master, zero-filling/sector recovery, repartitioning/reformatting and reloading. The drive interface is now at the 100MHz speed as it should be and has not coughed up a single error. The old 40MB drive was added to the cable jumpered as a Slave. The machine can now dual-boot to either drive's copy of W2K independently of the other. Everything else working OK, but the cat is still kind of upset.
All this pain could have been avoided if the drives were configured as Master/Slave to begin with. Cable select is a great idea if it would have ever been implemented in the industry consistently. It positively *will* work when properly configured. I know it will also work for a single drive on certain motherboard/drive combinations. This is just one example of a combination that CS will *not* work for a single drive on a single cable - I would guess there are many others.
If you always want to be sure, use Master/Slave. If Cable Select is working OK for you right now, then don't change a thing - it's configured properly.
Anyone else have a similarly (mis)configured system - CS on only one drive / BIOS can't recognize drive / NT-2K-XP can recognize and use? It would be interesting to see if there are any patterns by motherboard or drive. I guess it would also be good to know cases were it *was* working properly.
I'll write up a FAQ if we collect enough information.