Odd hard drive behaviour

Stephen

I've got three hard drives in my system at the moment.
On the primary IDE channel is a 120GB western digital 8MB/7200RPM (ATA100) and a 120GB maxtor 5400RPM drive (with a supposed max speed of ATA133, heh). The other IDE channel has an old 40GB/7200 RPM IBM drive and a pioneer 106 DVD burner. The devices on the primary channel will only run at ATA33 speeds, even though both support at least ATA100. If I change settings in Windows 2000 to make them use higher speeds, the system will not boot (blue screen with inaccessible boot device message). I have to press F8 during startup and select last known good configuration to get back into Windows.

Anyone know what's the story with this?
Specs as follows:

Abit NF7-S 2.0
onboard sound and ethernet
2x PC3200 256MB twinmos CL2.5 (dual ddr)
AMD athlon xp 2800+ (333)
geforce 4 Ti4200 64mb
the aforementioned hard drives and dvd burner
asus crw 4012A cd burner on S-ATA controller
400W antec PSU

Cheers.

Edit: Also have nforce chipset and graphics drivers from around December 2003 installed

Mutant_Fruit

look at the IDE cable and count the number of wires on it. If it has about 40 wires, then its an old sh*te cable, and can only take 33 speeds. If it has about 80 wires, then its a new cool wire, and can ake up to 133 speeds.
You may be able to switch the IDE cables around inside your computer, if you have an 80-wire on the 40gb drive. Otherwise, you'll have to buy one. I don;t think they;re that expensive.

i had this exact problem, and i had a good cable on my cd-rom drives, so i switched it with the old 40wire cable that was connectinog my hd's.

Stephen

shíte, that's probably it, never thought of that.
Fortunately i have a big drawer full of IDE cables to root through, I'm sure there's a few decent ones in it.

Mutant_Fruit

let me know how you get on.

Señor Juárez

also, try only connecting a single drive to the controller, and see if the drive will run at higher speeds.