Very weird IDE issue

Paulw

Ok, here's a good one.

In my PC I have 2 internal SATA hard disks, 1 IDE hard disk and 1 IDE DVD burner.

Everything has worked fine for over 2 years.

A few weeks ago I was occasionally finding that IDE HDD was missing from my system. A reboot worked fine, in most cases. Suddenly, IDE HDD was not working. A check in the BIOS showed that the machine could see the drive just fine (300GB WD disk). So, I played around with a few bits.

I removed the HDD and plugged it in to an external disk drive. The system could see and read the disk just fine.

I removed the DVD burner, and booted the system with the single IDE HDD on the ribbon. All worked fine.

I tried the DVD burner on the external disk drive and it works fine.

So, I thought it might be a faulty ribbon. I replaced the ribbon. Same issue.

Both devices were set to CS (Cable select). I tried setting both devices manually - HDD as master, DVD as slave, and then DVD as master and HDD as slave. Neither combination worked, and each time it picked up the HDD in the BIOS but not the DVD. A POST always errored saying faulty DVD drive.

I'm TOTALLY confused. Each device will work alone on the IDE channel. But, the devices won't work together.

I plugged in a different IDE DVD drive, and the HDD and this DVD drive will work together.

Is it possible the DVD burner is faulty, in that it won't work with the HDD but will work alone as a single device on that channel??

Any comments/ideas would be appreciated.

Lazarus2.0

It could well be a fault in one of the IDE devices . Cheapest and easiest thing to try first is a different optical drive on the same ribbon as the HD ...

Paulw

I did.

The machine is now running with a different IDE DVD drive just fine. And the DVD burner will work fine connected to an external disk drive connection (USB-IDE drive).

I've tried every single thing I can think of, through my 15+ years in IT.

Lazarus2.0

Paulw wrote: »

I did.

The machine is now running with a different IDE DVD drive just fine. And the DVD burner will work fine connected to an external disk drive connection (USB-IDE drive).

I've tried every single thing I can think of, through my 15+ years in IT.

I could only guess in that case that there's an issue with the board on the DVD drive causing it either to fail to recognise jumper instruction or it's BIOS/firmware has corrupted so it has 'forgotten' how to cohabit . If it was my machine and I was bored enough I might try to master or slave it with another optical drive (assuming the IDE HD isnt the system disk) just out of curiosity but in reality I'd probably try a firmware update then settle for using it as an external , tbh .
I've a lot less experience than yourself so you're probably miles ahead of me in any case

Standard Toaster

Had this before and it was the cd-rom drive that was at fault. Replaced it.
Lucky optical drives are cheap as chips nowadays

TommyGun

did you go in and check the disk manager in admin tools in the control pannel? sometimes there is a problem giving the drive a letter eg D. this can happon when there is lots of drives. you can then assign it a unused letter eg Z . if there is no fuctional problem the drie will still show here.....

Paulw

It's not a problem with the disk drive assignment. I've tried all that.

The DVD burner and HDD, as well as motherboard all have the latest firmware/drivers.

Everything worked just fine for over 2 years and then suddenly started to fault.

No new hardware has been added in a number of months.

I've tried every possible combination of master/slave/CS.

I think the issue is the DVD burner working with another device, but yet the DVD burner works perfectly fine when on a channel alone.

A new DVD burner is now on order (€32), so I'll see how that goes. Worst case is that I now have a spare DVD burner than I can use externally.

I'm just totally confused, and have never ever come across anything like this before.

BKtje

I've come accross this a few times with optical drives. They work fine on their own but when plugged in with another device one or other (or both) aren't picked up. Has only ever occured with a device that's a few years old but imagine it could happen with newer drives too.

I know this isn't much help unless you want confirmation that this type of thing does actually occur (currently have 3 machines here in the office with this or a very similar problem).

Paulw

Cheers for that.

Hopefully the new DVD burner drive I've ordered will work fine. I'll know in 2-3 days once it's delivered.

td2008

Hi Paul,
All the devices are appearing ok in the bios but not in windows yeah? Did you try reinstalling the chipset/ide drivers for your motherboard??