HDD and CD-Rom on same cable-good or bad?

[FMZPLAYER1]

I am trying to setup a new system , athlon 2000+, with dual boot win98, and winXP.... But I can't get win98 setup to run (it needs to be installed first, THEN XP --I know that one already)

I have a WD 60 gig HDD, and a Liteon CD burner on the same IDE cable, could that be a problem? Bios finds them ok, and I have correct master/slave setup. Should I only have HDD on IDE 1, and CD's on IDE 2? There is nothing in the system exept a GEforce 4 video card, and a SCSI host card for scanner/zip drives.

Maybe I should remove the SCSI card, and /or rewire the HDD cabling? I'm wondering if the setup failures are caused by data bus (IDE) issues? I'm getting things like "setup cannot continue due to a corrupted .cab file" or "there has been a serious error while writing to disk c" I'm also getting conflicting mbr information, when I FDISK from dos floppy, format the drive in DOS, then run WIN98 setup from cd. Sometimes I just let the setup CD run the formatting, but that doesn't seem to make any difference. I am using the 40 conductor IDE cable, I do have an 80 conductor cable somewhere (maybe that's what I need?)

It just seems like there is general data corruption occuring, causing read errors, setup failures at any given stage.

 

[Accessdabbler]

Yes, HDD and CD should be on separate cables.

Yes, remove SCSI card until Win install is complete then add back the SCSI card.

 

[FMZPLAYER1]

Thanks
It turns out that there was a memory/cpu speed problem too, reduced the system speed, and removed the SCSI card too, and it completed setup. The CD and HDD are still on the same cable, but are working ok for now,(if I have trouble burning CD's, then I'll try moving the burner to another IDE cable)

The system speed was returned to normal after, just some memory speed settings needed to be changed, sync and timing.

 

[cdogg]

For future reference, you'll want to find out of the CDROM is UDMA compatible (uses DMA - ATA/33, ATA/66). If it's not, then chances are it runs in PIO Mode 4 or lower. PIO mode is not a good thing since the device is forced to access the CPU in order to use RAM. This can severely drain resources and force the other IDE device on the same channel to also use PIO Mode. In your case, that would be the hard drive and would not be a good thing!

If your secondary controller is not in use, I highly suggest connecting the CDROM to that one instead. Otherwise, investigate to make sure your CDROM doesn't use PIO.


~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein

 

[paparazi]

Following on from Cdogg if the secondary IDE channel is free then it really would be best to use it and have Hard drive and Writer on differant channels.
And you really ought to find that fine ultra IDE cable and use it for Hard drive connection, your 60Gig is likely to be ATA100 and the cable you are using is for ATA33 devices so it should be changed for optimum performance.
Martin Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[Kocky]

To my knowledge you can't use a ATA33 cable on a ATA100 device. The ATA100 is 80 pin's and a ATA33 uses 40 pin's instead.