Setting up IDE drives

[Tony Williams]

Such a pain! I currently have a ...

NEC DVDRW
BENQ DVDRW
160GB HDD
80GB HDD

I have two channels on my motherboard at the moment both optical drives are on one channel and the hard disks on the other. I had them setup, optical drive and hard drive on one and the other optical drive and hard drive on the other didn't make a difference although it wasn't bad awhile back but I recently had a clear out in the system it's gotten worse.

Basically the problem lies in the 160GB drive (80GB is fine) whenever I transfair fairly beefy files (or even <1GB) my computer goes unusable and it takes like 6 minutes. I even notice when I right click the desktop or something the arrow pauses for a second even though it's got nothing to do with the drive.

I've tried sending a file from my SATA drive to the 160GB drive and it was about 2 unstable minutes while the 80GB only took a little over 10 seconds and the computer did halt.

I use this drive for HD Trailers and such to play on my screen, you can see how it's not a wise idea. Tomorrow I might rip it open and take a look. I'm not too sure on what the jumpers are set to, I'm sure they are either right or cable select.

So how should I ideally set the jumpers, channels and devices? ... The optical ones are fine.

[LeftyAce]

If you have 80 wire ide cables (thin ridges) set all the drives on CS (Cable Select).

Based on what you describe about the 160GB drive, I would go into the device manager and see if the drive is running in DMA mode.

Also, what brand is the drive? Download and run the manufacturer's diagnostics to rule out a hardware problem.

[Cricket]

What kind of computer is this? Home built or name brand?

What are the complete system specs for this computer? List the parts by brand and model including the power supply.

What operating system are you using?

:) Cricket

[Tony Williams]

It's home built.

AMD 3000+ skt 939, 1GB RAM Corsair VS (512MBx2), Asus6600GT, 370W Enermax Noisetaker, 2x optical drives, 2 IDE hard drives, 2 SATA hard drives, MSI Mobo.

Windows XP Pro SP2

I think the problem is down to the cabling, jumper settings and such is it a wise idea for 2x optical drives to be on one channel and have 2x hard disks on the other?

I'll dive inside tomorrow, it's 4am here.

The drive is an Hitachi and there diag tool installs but doesn't run "xxxx.dll file missing" I'll do a search tomorrow for it and see if I can get it running.

[Cricket]

I think the problem is down to the cabling, jumper settings and such is it a wise idea for 2x optical drives to be on one channel and have 2x hard disks on the other?Having the drives set up that way is fine. Make sure that if you're using a 80 wire IDE cable for the hard drives that the jumper is set to CS (cable select)...blue connector to motherboard, black connector on the end is the master connector and the grey middle connector is the slave connector.

If you're using a 40 wire IDE cable for the optical drives, use the master/slave jumper settings. But if you're using a 80 wire IDE cable set the jumpers to CS.

You might want to change out the IDE cable to the hard drives.

And you might want to test the hard drives with the manufacturer's diagnostic utility.

:) Cricket

[Tony Williams]

Fixed, it was an 80 wire and I set it to master/slave and oddly it worked.

Fixed now. Cheers guys.