Hard Drive Or Mobo?

[Eskimo69]

k got this Intel al440lx. If I boot to a floppy disk with my hard drive attached it takes about 5 minutes to get to a prompt screen scandisk won't even initilize and neither will windows 98 setup. Fdisk takes a few minutes to load. My CD-rom is on the primary controller on cs. If I disconnect my HD my cd rom automatically becomes master (like it's supposed to right).But with my HD disconnected everything runs at normal speed and from power on to the prompt takes about 20 seconds. same thing happens if I use the secondary controller for my cd-rom makeing it sm and my HD PM so I guess my question would be, Could there be and IRQ conflict (probably not since I think each IDE drive has it's own IRQ, but I could be wrong)? And an IRQ conflict would probably result in nothing. I'm not really sure how DMA's work I guess I could look it up if I had to.

Format takes about 2 hours but will finally get to the part where it verifies free space then stops responding

 

[paparazi]

Why don't you just use two IDE cables and set both the hard drive and CDrom to master on there own channels.
Martin

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[Eskimo69]

I think I said I tried that. Well anyways I tried that and got the same results. I think I am going to end up getting a new HD or a cheap used one and if there is problems I can always take it back and if that isn't the problem everyone can use an extra hd.

 

[relaksuah]

[tt]Hi Eskimo69, you could also try switching the cables for your CD-ROM drive and your HDD. If both are old/reused cables try getting one from a working PC. It's trial and error.

By the way, you stated that it's on CS? Try making the HDD on MASTER and the CD-ROM drive SLAVE instead of relying on CS.

Lotsa things to try out, but too many might confuse anyone (like hey, it confused me too last time) give it a go

 

[Eskimo69]

Just the cd-rom is on cs even if I just disconnect the cd-rom I get the same thing. I've changed the jumpers on the hd quite a bit something I don't understand though is why the diagram for the hd jumper settings has 3 sets of pins (6 pins) and the back of my drive has 9 pins?? I may have tried a different cable but just in case I will try some more thanks for the help guys

 

[relaksuah]

[tt]Hi Eskimo69, be careful of how you configure your HDD jumpers. You should try to figure out whether your pins are shorted correctly. In such a case as yours, I would check the pins where they are soldered to the PCB of the HDD. You might get to see which pin is pin 1 or better you might see which are the ones to short for which use (ma/sl/cs).
Check the BIOS if you can see your HDD. It should show there anyway, also telling you whether it is master or slave or it cant see your HDD at all.

 

[Eskimo69]

It only has master cs and parkI have no Idea what park is supposed to be and it doesn't recognize the drive in this mode. I just tried the cables I'm using now and it didn't seem to help. I'm kind of wondering if it's the 3.5 drive or something. I dunno, It reads from A: like it's supposed to on boot then sits with a blinking cursor for about 45 seconds and then asks me if I want to boot with cd rom support when I chose to boot with cd-rom support it takes about 30 more seconds before I get a prompt. This is weird I don't think that it is just my proc. or board speed I've had 233's run 3 times this fast I'm thinking it could be almost anything now because without the hd it only gets to prompt 30 seconds faster. Could it be my Floppy drive. I mean it reads from the drive about the same speed as the rest and then it just stops like it's thinking. It could be ram because I kinda have a mix and match in there creating a little freezing which woud really suck because pc100 is hard to find.....
I haqve no more idea's for now so I guess we're down to brainstorming and testing. Is there a way to test things like this? Kinda like a post diag. card or something

 

[Eskimo69]

Ignore my other threads

 

[Eskimo69]

Does anyone know if this board supports pc133 as well as pc100.

 

[Eskimo69]

I got it going turns out my hard drive was bad and so was and my cd-rom suddenly went bad also. so I got a new maxtor 20gb hd, and a 54x cd-rom and it runs wonderfully. (now I just need a new monitor)