This isn't directly related to editing, but there are a lot of technically-inclined people here so I thought I'd post it.

I got my new computer today, finally. I got it used from a web client of mine. When Purolator dropped it off though, the box was pretty beat up. When I took it out the only thing that looked damage was the front of the case which had broken off, and the CDRW drive had fallen off its rails. I fixed it up and put some duct tape on the front and it worked fine

But now, there's something screwed with the IDE channels. I have 4 devices hooked up: a CDRW, a DVD-ROM, and 2 40gig hard drives. When I start up the computer, sometimes it will only recognize the CDRW. I restart it and it might recognize the first hard drive with the OS on it, or sometimes it will partially recognize that hard drive but refuse to boot from it. It barely ever recognizes the other hard drive and the DVD-ROM drive. What the hell's going on?

Here's the configuration:

Primary Master: Phillips CDRW (this came with the computer)
Primary Slave: Samsung DVD-ROM drive
Secondary Master: IBM Deskstar 40gig (this came with the computer)
Secondary Slave: my Maxtor 40gig

I've filed a damage report with Purolator/USPS and emailed the guy about it. It's got insurance on it as well.

Thanks for any help!

Give me some more information, what motherboard is it?

I've seen this many times before, a lot of time it is simply because of the IDE cables themselfs, being cheap or whatever. I actually bought some rounded IDE cables at a computer show a while ago, and my harddrive didn't like it, and my computer never recognized it with them cables, so I put my old ones back on....thats probably not the case here though.

You have the jumpers set right, the cables are on tight, and everything is on the right channels right?

My uncle is particularly awesome at this kind of stuff, I myself can't give much helpful info over the phone or internet, I have to be there with the stuff in front of me, and then I can usually fix it in a snap. :D

Thanks :)

I know what you mean about having to be there, people barely ever learn from me because I usually do it for them!

Do you have a list of jumper settings handy? Isn't there one mode that automatically detecs its position?

Anyway, here's some more information:

Motherboard: Epox EP-8KTA3
Processor: AMD Athlon @ 1.00 GHz
RAM: 1.5GB
OS: WinXP Pro

Quite a very similar system to mine -- except I have a cheap motherboard and not nearly as much ram. :D

Yeah the "cable select" jumper sometimes does the job, but I only use it as a last resort...

Jumper settings vary on different hard drives/cdroms.

The jumpers are located on the back where you plug the IDE cable in.

Look for a diagram, basically you want your main HDD to be the Primary Master, and then your 2nd HDD to tbe the Primary Slave, and then your main CD drive to be the Secondary Master, and your 2nd CD drive to be the Secondary Slave...

If you have 2 masters or some crap like that, the computer will be confused and go like "wtf?!?".

Alright, I'll try that. I was going to try putting the hard drives on different IDE channels since it's better for editing, but the cables weren't long enough.

What do you mean?

You want to have both hard drives on the same Channel, the ATA100 (possibly 133, or in a bad case, 66), one. There is a Channel for the Harddrives and the CD-roms on motherboards, does it make a differnece, you ask? Big time...

shouldn't the boot drive be on the primary channel ??

you need to get into SET UP ( during boot you hit ?? depends on manufacturer - some it's delete others F? , some tell you during boot sequence ) .. once inside go to the IDE channel and see what the boot sequence is .. most are primary 1st then 2ndary - you can change the order

now if it took a hard fall maybe a jumper on one of the devices is loose ? ide cable not snug ?

Nah, the boot sequence doesn't have anything to do with it not posting (detecting) the harddrives/cdrom drives. :D

If this is a new computer and it was delivered to you in that
condition I would not have accepted it. If it is that beaten up
how do you know your harddisk is in good condition? I mean
you are talking about a drive that fell off its railings and you]
have to use duct tape! I'm not surprised you are having troubles
with your system.....

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : If this is a new computer and it was delivered to you in that
condition I would not have accepted it. If it is that beaten up
how do you know your harddisk is in good condition? I mean
you are talking about a drive that fell off its railings and you]
have to use duct tape! I'm not surprised you are having troubles
with your system..... -->>>

Rob,
The hard drive was fine, it was the CDRW that fell of its rails. And I used duct tape for the plastic front :P

I'm going to get in touch with him today, I think the insurance should hopefully cover some of this.

Hi all,

I am currently having problems with the IDE chains in my comp. Currently I have a 60 Gb HD running Windows XP Home as the Primary Master and a CD-ROM as the Primary Slave, I also have a 80 Gb Hd running as the Secondary Master and CD Burner as the Secondary Slave. My problem is that I can only run 3 of these at any one time, and I can run the 3 in different combinations on the IDE chains.

Can anyone help me out??

When I get this problem sorted then I will be editing on Premiere 6.0, but until then, there isn't much that I can do.

Cheers
Ryan Beatson

Argh. You want both hard drives on the same channel.

You main hard drive is supposed to be Primary Master, and then the 2nd one is supposed to be Primary slave.

The secondary channel is for CD Drives -- ONLY. It doesn't run the ATA speed (either 66,100,133, deping on your motherboard) that your hard drives do, so it won't be nearly as fast.

Alex,

Why do you think that the second channel cannot run devices
at their full speed? I know you have been assembling PC's etc.
for a while, so have I and I have never had this problem. What
does NOT work is mixing speeds. The IDE controller will take the
lowest speed and every device on that channel will operate
at that speed.

Anyway, I added a Promise ATA133 controller so that I have
2 more IDE channels. One of the advantages of the Promise
controller is that you CAN mix different devices and different
speeds without it effecting performance.

I do agree with you that you want your two harddisks on one
channel and the CD drive on the other. Personally I'd get a
Promise controller and put each device on its own channel to
be safe....

Lots of good information in this post!

It turns out the IDE controller is the problem. It looks like I"ll be able to get the full claim for the computer, so I'm going to build myself another computer with the money. How much is this Promise controller?

Glad you got it sorted out, hope everything turns out even better with the new computer.

There are a variety of add on ATA controllers sporting ATA133 with or without RAID features. They average around $70 to $100 and include manufacturers like Adaptec, Highpoint Technology, and Promise, along with some others. But I would choose from those 3. Some are even cheaper. They allow you to throw in more devices but if you purchase a new motherboard you might very well have one with 4 IDE connectors (for support of up to 8 devices) and possibly even Serial ATA for when Serial ATA hard drives become available.

Although the boot sequence itself may not have been the problem, Don was right about checking the BIOS. Your devices should be listed there and if not then you already know you have a hardware based problem (if they are listed and the devices are fine, then I'd check for Windows problems and so on, in a process of elimination). The F2 or Delete key should get you in depending on the BIOS manufacturer of your motherboard. And the hard drive does not necessarily have to be the first, Windows is clever enough to search for the boot partition which may be on a SCSI controller for example with a CD burner and DVD-ROM on the Primary channels.

That's the first thing I did when I booted it up, I went into the BIOS. It was very sporadic; sometimes it would detect two devices, sometimes just one, sometimes it would list the Secondary Slave as something like $t$dk _ 34. It didn't matter which device was hooked up where as well, I tried a few different combinations. Anyway, I'll trash this motherboard as soon as I get the claim. One of my clients (http://www.pcfx.cc) builds computers so I can get some hardware at cost :D

That is good news, Alex. Good luck with your new system. As
stated above the Promise controllers aren't that expensive
(they also have RAID controllers which are more expensive but
still not that much).

I have no personal experience with any of the other brands.

Alex, the HS student one, sorry bud, but you got that completely wrong. The secondary IDE channel is just that, a Secondary channel that has full bus and bus mastering to the subsystems of the mainboard. The slave/master config maybe what you have confused. Hard Disk Drives should always be masters, if possible and masters if the other component on the channel is not a hard drive.

Masters are exactly as it implies, it is the master of the channel if a HDD is following a CD, you will get problems in POST or while transferring data. The secondary channel IS the best place for your CD ROM. But if you have mor ethan one HDD and more than one CD-ROM, ideally to allow and optimize copying CD's on the fly, (Try Ahead Nero on the fly copying with two CD-ROM drives in the same channel and you will get a message) the two CDROM/CD-R should be in separate channels. So ideally with 2 HDD's and 2CD drives this would be the optimal physical configuration:

Primary Master: HDD
Primary Slave: CD-ROM
Secondary Master: HDD
Secondary Slave: CD-ROM

Alex is right about the fact that boot drives do not necessarily be in the primary master channel, but it should be. This makes it easier for the BIOS to find the OS.

In the new computer I'll be building once I get the claim, I'm going to get an ATA controller as Chris mentioned, so I can have a grand total of 8 devices :)

Now, I'll have 4 hard drives: 2 7200rpm 40gigs, one 7200rpm 80gig and a 5400rpm 13 gigger which I use for my OS right now.

I figure I'll put one of the 40gigs as the Primary master since that's got the new OS on it right now, and put the 13 as the slave. I'll just use those two drives for programs, web design stuff and miscellaneous storage.

On Secondary I'll put the 80 gig as the master and the 40 as the slave. I'll be using the 80 for video obviously, probably the 40 for music production stuff and a bit of video. Then, on the ATA controller I'll stick my optical drives. Does this sound like a good setup?

Oh and by the way, here are some pics of the computer for your enjoyment:
The case (http://www.alextaylor.org/images/computer-case.jpg)
The guts (note the detached processor fan!) (http://www.alextaylor.org/images/computer-inside.jpg)

Alex that sounds like a good plan, but keep in mind on the ATA controller, where your optical drives will be, they should not have a slave master relationship, but actually on the two separate channels.

If you place your OS bootable drive in the Primary slave position you will not have C:\ designation to the OS partition (unless you specify this in W2K or XP it is easy WIN98, forget it.) making it non-standard and you will remember to always specify drive as letter d:\ for your OS. May help you to "ghost" the OS unto the 40GB and use some of it for program directories. Use the 13Gb for programs and images (porn, yay!) and stuff, DOCs, etc. and the remaining 80 and 40 as Video or whatever.

The cPU has way too much goop on it from the picture when you build the new one take a small BB sized drop of paste (silver if possible) and spread it using the edge of a business card over the CPU. Careful not to get crap outside the die. Silver is highly conductive of both heat and electricity and will short the tiny bridges out. The paste layer should almost be transparent or you will not get optimal heat transfer to the HSF. It would actually serve as the opposite and insulate the heat. If you need to remove goop use a high concentrate of rubbing alcohol (99%) and wipe off the excess goop being careful not to saturate the CPU with Alchohol.

Thanks Garret, I'll keep that in mind!

And the 40 gig that I will have as the Primary master DOES have my OS on it. The 13 gig is what i'm running off of right now, but I'm going to format that and use it for documents once I put together my new computer.