When I do a warm boot, my c: drive is not recognized, but when I shut it down and restart cold, its there. Running Win2K with 300mb RAM intel celeron 766mhz. Any ideas?

The only thing I can think of would be a heat problem, but I think that would show up before a reboot. Are you having to reboot because of BSOD?

Budfred

What HDD specs are involved?

system hardware is is two maxtor hard drives, one 30 gig partitioned at 5/25, and one 20 gig as C:. Both are 7200 rpm. CD drive is Yamaha CD-RW 44x24x44. C: drive is set as hdd 0 master with cd drive as slave; other hdd is hdd 1.

I'm rebooting warm when updating software. When it doesn't see the C: drive, I shut off power and then turn it back on again right away (after the drive spins down of course), and it works fine being cold booted.

Well, apparently the Yamaha cd burner and c: drive didn't want to play nice together, so I made the burner slave to hdd 1 and left hdd 0 all by itself. That fixed my problem. Thanks for your help!

You may want to think about taking it a step further and putting both hard drives on the same IDE cable and let the CD have its own playspace. Depending on your system, the CD may slow down the function of your hard drive.

Good to hear you got it fixed!! :cool: :)

Budfred

I've heard that if you have two hard drives on the same ide cable that it slows the hard drives down. Can anyone clarify this? Thanks.

As I understand it: if one of the drives runs at ATA100 and the other at ATA66, older systems will tend to limit the speed to that of the slower drive. If they are both ATA100, they will run fine. On newer systems apparently this limitation is no longer true, so each drive can run at its rated capacity. On the other hand, I believe that CD drives which transfer data at a much slower rate than hard drives, can slow hard drives ability to transfer data if they are on the same line. Again, this may not be true on newer systems.

Budfred

My 2¢.

There is no absolute right or wrong way to utilise the commonly-available 2 IDE cables for 4 devices. It depends on what you do with your system "most of the time". If you spend most of the time copying from CD to CDR then a different setup from one where you are mostly accessing both HDDs is advisable. Etc, etc.

The best setup is to have no slaves at all, but if using RAID/SCSI is not an option and you have more than two drives, you will have to compromise one way or another.

THIS (http://www.geocities.com/orchis_2k/articles/ide_orchis.html) delineates some of the permutations. It does also seem to perpetuate the "urban myth" (at least for modern systems ~2to3 years old - whose controllers can work independently) that HDDs on the same channel will run at the slowest one's speed. Note that on some older systems even a lone ATA100 may run at ATA66.

For the average user who is not into gaming, o/c-ing and tweaking to the last, it probably makes little significant difference how you permutate unless you have an "old" system and very mis-matched devices.

And of course file size matters....if you are talking about files approaching 1 GB in size then the impact is more noticeable, but for most files under 100 MB it is doubtful that much will be noticed except in benchmarks. Spindle speed actually makes more of a noticeable difference than ATA rating.

Thanks to everyone for their input. I reconfigured my system and put both HDDs on one IDE cable and the CD writer on its own IDE. I'll be posting another thread sometime in the near future expressing my frustration with a cd writer working with nero but not with easy cd creator. Thanks!