I'm trying to find out what could be going wrong with my drive setup. I just put together another computer from various parts, all of which worked OK before.
But the 30 GB drive on the secondary master will only list as PIO mode in the device manager.
I used a QDI mainboard that had previously handled 40 and 60 GB drives in ultra dma modes.
I have a 20 GB C drive and a CD drive on the primary controller and both show up as dma drives (ultra dma mode 5 and multi-word dma mode 2)and have only the 30 GB drive as the master on the secondary controller, which I want to use for video, but if it only shows up as a PIO mode drive, I know it won't be able to handle it.
It's a windows XP home with SP1 setup and I have not yet installed any software (just built it today) until I get the drive problem worked out.
The drive is the only component that I haven't used before since it came from the IT department at my school, but it's a 30 GB maxtor and it's unlikely that any 30 GB drive could be so ancient that it wasn't dma.
The motherboard has a VIA chipset and I installed the latest Hyperion drivers just in case that it was the culprit, but that made no difference, and anyway, the other drives on the primary controller were being recognized as ultra dma already.
The cable is an 80 pin ultra dma cable.
I just can't figure out what could be causing it to see the drive as PIO mode only.
I've built many computers before, so I'm not new at this. I tried changing some options in the bios but nothing has made any difference.
I have a little 6 GB drive at home that I will bring in to try on the controller on Monday just to check if it's the 30 GB drive at fault, but I would appreciate it if anyone can please give me some advice or suggestions to try.
Thanks a lot.
exactly which model of drive ?
some have a program to enable dma mode , some use jumpers to set dma mode.
It's a Maxtor model 2F030J0 30 GB Drive.
I'm trying to find out more about in on their site.
It's
30 GB Hard Drive
5,400 rpm
DMA/ATA-133 (Ultra) Fast Drives - 40 pin IDC
Seek Time - 12 ms (average)
2 MB Buffer
Gary,
Thanks, I had already read it, and the only thing that I could find was that it talks about a 40 pin (or is it the number of wires in the ribbon?) cable and I've used an 80 pin cable.
Do you have any idea if using the 80 pin rather than a 40 pin could cause the problem to happen?
It certainly will be one of the things I try on Monday.
Thanks
It`s the number of cables 80. 40 refers to the connector pins.
Have you tried either deleting or uninstalling the secondary IDE controller. Then re-boot. XP get`s itself in a knot sometimes.
1. always use 80 wire cables , that way if you update a drive , you won't need to update the cable again.
2. agree with john , it could be that xp is confused , depends upon what stage of installation installed the motherboard ide drivers.
Well, I tried about a dozen things, including all the suggestions here and some other suggestions from other forums, but nothing worked. I suspect that the secondary controller is faulty because the drives are fine on other systems and all drives go to pio on the faulty controller.
The dealer said that it wouyld cost about 40 pounds to change the secondary controller, but I can't afford it right now, so I just put the cd rom drive on the secondary controller and put the two hard drives on the primary controller.
Thanks again to everyone for all their helpful advice.
Just to clarify a 40 wire cable can only be used up to UDMA Mode 2 (ATA33). Above that requires an 80wire cable and if you do use a 40 wire cable on drives or ide controllers above mode 2 it will switch it down to mode 2 itself!
One way to get round your faulty Sec channel is to buy a controller card that plugs into a pci slot. I am sceptical that the controller IS faulty though and it would have been interesting to see what happened if you had downloaded the maxtor hd utility! I wonder if you ever tried resetting bios?
Originally posted by jimmy the jock:
I am sceptical that the controller IS faulty though and it would have been interesting to see what happened if you had downloaded the maxtor hd utility! I wonder if you ever tried resetting bios?
Jimmy, what do you mean by resetting the bios? Is that the same as updating it?
I noticed that once I had the secondary controller reporting the cd as some sort of dma word mode 2 (?) rather than pio, but it went back to pio mode.
I did download the maxtor hd utility, but since I put the drive on the primary as a slave I didn't bother using it. Can you advise me on what I should do with the utility?
Thanks.
go to control panel and uninstall the driver, restart and the drivers will be re installed. Should do the trick