Cant get secondary IDE drives working

[Zinedene]

Hi,

I am helping this nursing home near my house, and have taken their computers to fix, and do some slight upgrades. Everything Im doing is for free obviously, they are only providing the essential purchases like ram etc.
Done 10PC's all without any major problems.
Im stuck on this one machine, which is becoming a headache.

I cant get the secondary IDE controller to pick up anything. Ive stuck the hard drive in, nothing, Ive stuck CD drive in , nothing.
Doesnt matter whether its master or slave setup, the secondary IDE wont work.

In BIOS, it says nothing is attached.
Now, stranger still, It was working before, with a CD RW on there, and a DVD drive. However, the whole PC kept freezing before, and would take 5mins just to right click and 'refresh'!
the machine would halt, and take ages just to click on a hard drive icon to open it.


Ive tried different cables, different setups, but cant suss it out..
Its an old pentium 500MHz PC, with 128Mb ram.
I can get the cd drive working, only when its connected as a slave in the primary ide port.

So, basically, Primary IDE port is working fine, but I cant get anything to work in secondary IDE port.

I dont wanna give them it back without the setup they had, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

Zinedene

[doctorgonzo]

Is there an option in the BIOS to enable/disable the secondary IDE channel? Double-check to make sure that it is enabled if so.

If that's not the problem and you have tried different cables, drives, etc. then the IDE controller may be bad. Time for a new controller or mobo.

[Zinedene]

yeah,

tried everything, and nothing working...on sec ide port.

What i dont get is how come it was working b4?
Mind you, since nothing has been in the sec IDEport, the machine has stopped freezing, and is running a lot better

kinda confusing, but thanks for the advise anywayz.

Zindene

[doctorgonzo]

It probably started failing with the hardware attached and progressively got worse, causing the delays and hangs. With the hardware attached it was able to function marginally, but now it is at a point where it can't even recognize new hardware. That's just my thoughts.

[bailey]

did you try a new ide cable ?

one thing you might try
go to the device manager and look at the secondary ide controler and see if there is any problems

then look at the properites and see if it is working ok or not, also look at the resources too.

if it all looks good then just delete it from the device manager, reboot the computer and it should come back and working ok.

if it still don't work then it is bad.

[edfair]

What OS? What kind of chipset.
There are known problems with chipsets on certain versions of the OS.
Have you tried with something like a 98SE bootdisk with CD support? If it works there you have a driver problem in your OS.

[Zinedene]

Hi,

thanks for all the replies....I appreciate it.
bailey, yip, tried new ide cables. nuthing...
edfair, Ive treid with startup disks, tried the Win98SE startup disk, and even the ME startup disk.when I choose with cd rom support, it just gives an error, and no device drivers loaded.
If I stick the cd rom in the Primary IDE port (as slave), then drivers are loaded, and shown straight away.
Its definately the secondary IDE port.

But,

Dont worry guys, thanks anyway for the help. I told my bro about it, and his work are giving/sending me quite a few New CPU's and Mobo's,ram etc for them in the nursing home. Im even getting some cordless keyboards and mice sent to me, all free, just for them. So, turns out everything will be alright.
I will return all the other PC's 2morrow hopefully, and will also tell them to expect another 5-10 for free!! so, Im sure they wont be too upset about loosing that one..which gives me a chance to take my revenge on the mobo...where's my baseball bat!!

thanks for all your help guys, I really appreciate it.

Zinedene

[KMARTshopper]

Ok this one is easy......... older HDDs . some want to be primary and thats all you get.........


Now with HDDs you have a few issues....... Some simply Die. I have an HDD that will run for 15 minutes then stop lol.

Lastly you have Jumpers. JUMPERS AAAAHH Dont you wish that every manufacturer did exaclty the smae thing for Master , Slave, Cable Select???

Well make sure that if you use the HDD it is on slave mode. Make sure that YOUR HDD with the Operating Sysytem is MA (Master) It really doesnt matter where you connect it on the IDEs. but keep them on same cable for purposes of this test. If you dont get the HDD to show up under those conditions, you have 1 of 2 issues... The HDD is dead or intermittently dying. or the Bios is too old to read UDMA/./// only reading PIO

1 other thing. try putting all extra equip on Secondary IDE cable. like CD drives or Hard Drives that are ATA33/. Putting ATA evices of diferent speeds will result in all devices on that cable running at same slow speed......

I hope my post was completely accurate.. I work on computers everyday, im much beter working on them that I am describing what i do !!

Girald

[glc]

Girald - I think it's been determined that the secondary IDE controller is dead. Also, the theory of dissimilar speed drives on the same cable causing a slowdown has been disproven, especially with Ultra IDE 80 wire cables and the use of cable select.

Zinedine: A PCI controller card would keep that thing going without tossing the motherboard. You could of course slave the CD to the hard drive on the primary and it would work just fine. It's probably just an ATA33 controller anyway.

A thought - it's possible that a bios flash/update or maybe even a simple cmos reset might fix it, worth a try.

[Zinedene]

glc, thanks for the input...

yeah i tried everything. everything that has been mentioned I have tried, apart from the PCI controller card, which I knew was an alternative method. CMOS setting didnt make no difference.
When i took the board off the case, i noticed that it was quite burnt on the back of the secondary IDE port, which might have caused the failure, or at least the freeze ups.

I was gonna just put the cd or dvd on slave and leave it at that...but to me thats not good enough, as I recieved it with both working cd/dvd drives, so I intend to return it with these devices working. Even tho it kept freezing, i feel obliged to return a PC that resembles the way it was given to me. These people were patient enough to wait during the freeze up screens, so I will have to give them back with the drives they already had installed. Only difference is they will have a new/better mobo in their.
But cause im getting more new stuff sent to me for them, I really enjoyed the idea of breaking that board. So I did. WoW! what a great feeling! thought drifting in my car was fun, but this comes close to that, well pretty close!
Ive still got the ram and cpu etc, so havent dashed the whole setup.

One good person from here sent me an IM saying they would send me the PCI controller card for FREE, which was very nice. And if they are reading, once again I thank you for the offer. Ive got a few new amd and Intel CPU chips getting delivered to my house, some mobo's, and also quite a bit of ram, and small harddrives (under 80Gb HDD's).All free, and going to them.

Thanks for the input people, I appreciate it, and will let everyone in the nursing home know that so many people helped me....best thing was it was for free...if u would have seen their original quote you honestly would have came over here, and kicked that guys arse who tried to charge them so much.

on a brighter note, I put the Wizard of Oz 2day on a PC when I returned the other completed PC's and they all loved it...brought back loads of memories they said. All the staff are happy that their PCs are much faster now. Their even more excited about the new ones Im gonna be building for them this week.
Seems like its going to be a good christmas for a few elders here! What more can we ask for!

thanks for all the advice you guys, I really appreicate it...

[MichaelMcK]

Could you PM me about this?

Wizard of Oz 2day.

What it is, where I can see / buy it?

My wife is a huge Oz fan....

Thanks

Mike