vibrissa
03-20-2001, 08:14 PM
I just bought a Quantum Fireball AS (7200rpm, 40GB) hard drive and partitioned it into a primary win98 partition (fat32) and an extended partition with volumes for win2K (ntfs) and mandrake 7.2. I navigate GRUB and then NT bootloader and can boot into each of these partitions: 98 and linux work fine, but win2k is another story. Halfway through the boot (the graphical windows 2000 progress-bar splash screen) my drive starts making noise like an electric pencil sharpener--like the actuator is going crazy and a lot of disk access is going down. The system stalls in the boot process (progress bar stops moving) and doesn't get any further until the noise stops. When the noise stops, the progress bar fills out a bit more (till it's nearly complete) and then noise starts again. After another minute of actuator grinding, it fills out the last bit of progress bar and finally dumps me on the Win2k desktop (~4 minutes total boot). When I enter a URL in IE, or double-click the hard drive and navigate in windows explorer, the noise returns and the computer freezes for about 30s until the grinding abates. When I try to access my ide devices using the disk manager (right click "my comp."> manage > IDEtree) the grinding starts and will not go away until I hard reboot.
This drive is set up as primary master with no slave on the same channel. I've flashed my BIOS to the latest version for this board, and loaded the latest VIA IDE busmastering (from the 4-in-1) drivers. I've tried disabling UDMA in both BIOS (designating PIO) and win2k device manager, all to no avail. The grinding also happens when I boot/setup from win2k install media. I have DHCP enabled--win2k gets its lease from my linksys router (seems to work fine) and I've disabled my NIC in device manager to test whether this was the problem (it wasn't). This same hard/software set-up, with a different hard drive (8GB 5400rpm fujitsu), worked fine. Here are some more particulars:
MoBo: Soyo 5ema+ Ver. 1.1
CPU: AMD K6-2 350
BIOS: Award flashed to 5empvea1.bin (rel. 5/26/2000)
IDE: IDE Bus Master Driver (v2.1.49) from 4-IN-1(v4.28a)
Pri. Master: 7200RPM Quantum Fireball Plus AS
Sec. Master: HP 9100i 8x CDR
Sec. Slave: generic 36x
Graphics: Matrox Productiva G100 AGP
NIC: 3com 3C900b XL
All other expansion cards/drives have been removed for troubleshooting. Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
Vic Brissa
This drive is set up as primary master with no slave on the same channel. I've flashed my BIOS to the latest version for this board, and loaded the latest VIA IDE busmastering (from the 4-in-1) drivers. I've tried disabling UDMA in both BIOS (designating PIO) and win2k device manager, all to no avail. The grinding also happens when I boot/setup from win2k install media. I have DHCP enabled--win2k gets its lease from my linksys router (seems to work fine) and I've disabled my NIC in device manager to test whether this was the problem (it wasn't). This same hard/software set-up, with a different hard drive (8GB 5400rpm fujitsu), worked fine. Here are some more particulars:
MoBo: Soyo 5ema+ Ver. 1.1
CPU: AMD K6-2 350
BIOS: Award flashed to 5empvea1.bin (rel. 5/26/2000)
IDE: IDE Bus Master Driver (v2.1.49) from 4-IN-1(v4.28a)
Pri. Master: 7200RPM Quantum Fireball Plus AS
Sec. Master: HP 9100i 8x CDR
Sec. Slave: generic 36x
Graphics: Matrox Productiva G100 AGP
NIC: 3com 3C900b XL
All other expansion cards/drives have been removed for troubleshooting. Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
Vic Brissa