weird issue with harddrive(s)

[Tikker]

in one of my boxes I've got 2x 20gb ide hard drives (identical)

1 is master, other is slave

master drive contains the OS

slave is just some data

grabbed an extra SATA drive and decided i'd replace the slave drive with it

powered off the machine, unhooked the slave drive(power and ide cable) and rebooted

machine wouldn't boot(nor could i get to bios)

this made me assume i'd grabbed the wrong drive somehow

so i put the drive back in and reboot
eveyrhing works np

so now i power down, pull out the other drive
reboot

machine wouldn't boot (nor could i get to bios)

now i'm jsut confused

put both back in, and it all works np

remove the slave drive again, and stick in an old old 5gb drive as slave and bam, the thing boots up np

so now at this point, it seems clear that the mobo is expecting a master and a slave drive

how do I get around this? I'm assuming it's a bios setting (or maybe a jumper?) but I'm having major issues getting into the bios of this board

[Diekan]

Buy an HP, I hear they're top of the line.

[Lueyen]

Have you tried clearing the slave in bios before removing it?

[Tikker]

i can't get into bios anymore, so no idea

it's just weird
usually when you can't get to bios (in my experience) you never are able to boot to windows

it boots to windows np, but not into bios

[Evermore]

reset the bios. there should be a jumper on the board that will allow you to do this

[Tikker]

did it

pulled the power, removed the CMOS battery
moved the jumpers for the 10-15 secs

put everything back

it boots to windows np, but I'm having issues getting into bios


this is just dumb

I hope i'm missing something simple

[Lyion]

I had the same problem with my secondary PC and never resolved it. I ended up using the SATA in a different machine.

The initial things I checked were PSU, IDE jumper properly setup, and SATA enabled via the BIOS. Also, your BIOS might need an update. None of these worked for me.

I doubt you're missing anything, your motherboard probably just doesn't play nicely with IDE and SATA

[Harrison]

I had to go through about an hour of jumper/bios hell to get my motherboard to take both IDE and SATA.

Asus A8S-X

Great board, but I think all boards hate using both to a degree.

[Tikker]

let's back up a sec


I haven't even gotten to the point where the SATA drive is being introduced yet


If I remove the 2nd IDE drive, the machine won't boot up

if I put it back(or any other ide drive, jumpered as a slave) it works just fine

It still doesn't want to load to bios tho, which is just weirding me out

[kaharthemad]

Tik I ran into a few things if your having problems still with this. and you are welcome to give me a phone call and we can go over some troubleshooting possibilities.
Drop me a pm if you want

[runamonk]

Does HP do the same as Compaq and store the bios access programs on a hidden partition of the drive?

This used to be a big issue for Compaq and you had to go out and download the bios access files and put them on a floppy and boot from floppy, then you could get into the bios.

[Tikker]

this isn't a HP machine

diekan was just failing to be hilarious



it's a custom built box with off the shelf parts (mobo is a N2MBP-Vm CSM by asus)

[runamonk]

hrm you should still be able to get into the bios then hehe.

You know what it sounds like to me is a keyboard issue, are you using a USB keyboard? I've had issues with my motherboard totally ignoring my keyboard if it's not plugged directly into the main usb port on my machine. It would work there but not through my hub.

oh and it would still work through windows, once windows loaded but prior to the OS loading it would totally ignore keyboard input.

[Evermore]

let's back up a sec


I haven't even gotten to the point where the SATA drive is being introduced yet


If I remove the 2nd IDE drive, the machine won't boot up

if I put it back(or any other ide drive, jumpered as a slave) it works just fine

It still doesn't want to load to bios tho, which is just weirding me out

is your primary drive jumpered as a master?

[Ndaara]

When you have just one drive in there, you need to not have it set to master. Mine has 3 jumper settings: Master, Slave, and CS (or something like CS). If you have it set to Master and you have only one drive, it gets confused. Set the jumper to CS (neither master nor slave) and you should have np booting with the one drive in.

Then, you can also load up the Slave (still set as slave) with the other set to CS (i really don't know what that stands for) and it should work.

I struggled with that also! Silly literal things.

[Tikker]

CS stands for cable select

primary drive is jumpered as master

and I thought about the USB thing

same behaviour with a PS/2 keyboard (i thought of that right away because i do have a bunch of compaqs at home and those won't boot at all without a keyboard)

[Tossica]

Could be corrupt BIOS. If the boot order is set to check the floppy, CD-ROM, etc before primary drive, you may be able to boot off a bootable CD or floppy with the BIOS image and flash utility on it.



Also, you shouldn't need to remove CMOS battery, etc to reset it. Just move the jumper to the short position and turn it on to reset it, then move the jumper back.

[Tikker]

Also, you shouldn't need to remove CMOS battery, etc to reset it. Just move the jumper to the short position and turn it on to reset it, then move the jumper back.

was just following the destructions in the manual for this mobo

[Lueyen]

It's kind of a long shot, but not that hard to try, you might try replacing the ribbon cable for the ide drives. They rarely go bad, and when they do it usually appears to be a bad hard drive, although it is feasible that a bad cable might need both drives to communicate properly.

I'm assuming you are hitting whatever key it is you need to access the bios from the time you start up, depending on configuration I've had machines boot past the chance to enter bios so fast it was easy to miss.

I think Tossica may be on the right track, it sure sounds like you have some sort of corruption with bios, and re-flashing it might correct the problem.

[Tikker]

yeah, i hit the bios access key (esc) and it starts to load, but just sticks on black screen

i've been into the bios on the board in the past

it looks like asus has a utility to reflash the bios while in windows, so i'll prolly go that route

[Tikker]

When you have just one drive in there, you need to not have it set to master. Mine has 3 jumper settings: Master, Slave, and CS (or something like CS). If you have it set to Master and you have only one drive, it gets confused. Set the jumper to CS (neither master nor slave) and you should have np booting with the one drive in.

Then, you can also load up the Slave (still set as slave) with the other set to CS (i really don't know what that stands for) and it should work.

I struggled with that also! Silly literal things.

Ndaara wins

jeje?

i just went and checked all my other machines

setting master/slave on them doesn't have that issue
maybe it's an ASUS thing? (this is only asus board i own)

soon as i swapped the jumped to CS, it worked fine
recognized the new sata drive
life is good

bios still doesn't want to load, so I'll ahve to do something about that, but it's up and working, so I almost don't care

[Ndaara]

I'm glad it worked! I have always used ASUS boards in the past, my current "good" computer is my first Intel build and it is also my first non-ASUS board. So you just happened to hit on an issue I'm familiar with. I am interested to learn that not all setups have the master/slave issue. That is good to know!