weird issue with harddrive(s)

Tikker · Post by **Tikker** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 8:36 pm

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 · Post by **Diekan** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 8:45 pm

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

Post by **Lueyen** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 9:11 pm

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

Tikker · Post by **Tikker** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 9:28 pm

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 · Post by **Evermore** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 9:34 pm

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

Tikker · Post by **Tikker** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 9:59 pm

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

Post by **Lyion** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 6:57 am

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 · Post by **Harrison** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 7:08 am

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 · Post by **Tikker** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 7:53 am

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 · Post by **kaharthemad** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 8:02 am

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 · Post by **runamonk** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 10:43 am

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 · Post by **Tikker** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 1:13 pm

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 · Post by **runamonk** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 1:15 pm

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 · Post by **Evermore** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 1:21 pm

Tikker wrote: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 · Post by **Ndaara** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 3:07 pm

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 · Post by **Tikker** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 4:10 pm

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)

Post by **Tossica** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 5:38 pm

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 · Post by **Tikker** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 7:46 pm

Tossica wrote:
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

Post by **Lueyen** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 8:22 pm

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 · Post by **Tikker** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 8:50 pm

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 · Post by **Tikker** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 10:10 pm

Ndaara wrote: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 · Post by **Ndaara** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 5:32 pm

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!