PDA

View Full Version : Harddrive delima


LeeV
02-20-2001, 10:28 AM
Hey everybody,

I collect old systems and hardware mainly looking for good parts and projects. Like Pete, I have a box of old hard drives, I go through looking for good ones. I thought I hit the jackpot when I got to this WD 1.2 gig drive, but now I'm not so sure. I unhooked the three drives in the machine, and set the victim up as master on primary IDE, and the cdrom as master on the secondary IDE. Went into the bios, and it did not autodetct the hard drive. When into the drive configuration settings, and it showed all the previous harddrives under user setting. Set everthing back to not installed, and did an autodetect and there was the new harddrive.

I booted with a startup disk, ran fdisk and formated the drive. I installed windows 98SE and was going to give it a few days and if all worked well use it as my primary drive, reformat my current C drive, and eliminate an old IBM 256MB drive from this system. I soon noticed that boot up took much longer with this hard drive. It would pause right after memory count for a full 30 seconds then hardrive Id would show up and windows booted normally.

This bothered me, I love how quick this machine will boot, and I noticed that when I would switch it back to the original setup there is no pause after memory count hard drive ID's show up all three boom, then off to windows. So I decided to use this drive just for storage space. I reformatted, did not make it a system disk, and istalled it as the secondary master, and hit the switch, did the bios, and rebooted... After the memory count Both primary drives, master and slave showed up followed by a 30 second pause and then secondary master and then off to windows. Today on boot after the usual 30 seconds I recieved the message Secondary HDC Failure hit F1 to resume. Restarted just fine after that except for the usual pause. So I wrote a book to ask a question that I probably allready know the answer to. Is the drive going bye bye?

I cant help but wish, I have all these big drives (1GB and over) that are paper weights, but it seems like every 10-15yr old 256MB and smaller IBM drive works! Need to get my next project going, a dual pentium server, with four SCSI drives with about 20gigs total, and the search for storage space for my little wannabe at home network will be over. LOL http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

Lee

Randy_tx
02-20-2001, 03:38 PM
I think you answered your own question....it's going bye bye.

------------------
"As hard as a rock & dumb as a brick"...Windows CEMeNT

LeeV
03-04-2001, 12:04 AM
UPDATE!

I got lucky for once, since I too really suspected the drive was on its way out. While searching for an answer to someone elses question I stumbled on to a WD hardrive troubleshooting link. There was a note about delayed booting and HDC failure messages. It seems that when this drive is the only one on a channel you must remove the Master/slave/CS jumper completely. I left it set for master! I had heard this before, but never experienced it first hand. Hope this might help someone else who might have over looked the obvious.

Lee V

Paleo Pete
03-04-2001, 09:08 AM
Never would have guessed it...

That must be one of the drives that has separate settings for single and dual drive setups...I have a couple of older drives here with those setups, but I guess I've gotten lucky. First thing I do when I pick up an older system is go find all the specs I can on everything inside. The Tech Page (http://www.thetechpage.com/cgi-bin/default.cgi) is one of the best sites I have found for hard drive specs, and I always print out the specs so I don't have to go search again later.

------------------
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

tjaymadison
03-04-2001, 02:05 PM
Wow, Pete!!! Thanks for that link to The Tech Page -- what a GREAT site! (As I add it to my ever-growing, I-know-it's-in-here-somewhere Favorites list) http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

Paleo Pete
03-05-2001, 09:17 AM
Another of my old favorites. Want a few more? Check out my site, posted in my signature. All the best links I've found over the past 3 or 4 years are posted there, and make sure and take a trip to the first link, Trish's Escape from Hardware Hell.

------------------
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)