Adding a hard drive

Paul King sciguy-Ja3L+HSX0kI at public.gmane.org
Sun Dec 24 14:26:17 UTC 2006


On 24 Dec 2006 at 2:59, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

> | From: Paul King <sciguy-Ja3L+HSX0kI at public.gmane.org>

> | The HD is on the same cable as a DVD-ROM (one which is only lightly used). The
> | HD is intended to be used as storage, with no executables. The HD is hooked up
> | to a 2-port PROMISE IDE card.
> 
> Are you sure that the promise card supports anything other than hard
> drives?

The card is has been used for a couple of years now, and has been running both 
hard disks and DVD drives, although on different ports until now. It is called 
an "Ultra 133". I had previously been careful about not mixing CD/DVD drives 
with HDs on the same cable. That might be part of the problem, and maybe a 
larger expansion card is in order ...?

>  Some RAID cards of that did not support ATAPI.  I never
> knew whether this was a hardware of driver implementation.  (I had an
> ABIT BP6, with a RAID chip onboard.  So did the main IDE driver
> maintainer (since replaced).  He said to only use hard drives on it,
> not cdroms, and he should know and was in a position to fix it if it
> were fixable.)
> 
> Are you using an IDE cable suitable for ultradma?  You know, the ones
> with twice as many conductors?
> 
> Certainly the first thing I would try would be to take everything else
> off the channel.
> 
> If your controller is really old, you might be experiencing the ~137G
> limit of the old IDE protocol.  Unlikely, I think.

All my HDs are UDMA. The cable connecting the HD in question is one I don't 
normally buy, but looks like it was made long after the UDMA technology was in 
place. The logo on it reads "Cables To Go", and it is styled like the more 
modern SATA cables (instead of a tape, the individual wires run through a 
flexible plastic tube), although the guy at Tiger Discount said that they were 
IDE, and I almost didn't believe him. Can't remember if he said UDMA also, but 
they seemed to have served me for the past 6 months or so until I got this new 
HD.

> 
> Consider testing the drive on your main IDE interface, without your
> original drive.  You haven't got much to lose since anything on the
> new drive is toast.

Well, nothing is currently on the drive. Except the formatting. But even then 
...

> 
> Don't forget to set the jumpers correctly.  I've heard that the new
> IDE cables (the ones with twice the conductors) are "cable select".

I haven't tried that yet... Does that mean that everything on the cable has to 
be "CS"? I played with "Master" and "Slave", and got to see the HD that way. 
But I couldn't do much.

FWIW, my cables look like the 40-conductor variety. So at best they are UDMA-3. 
According to the Wikipedia entry below which you suggested, 80 conductors was 
not introduced until UDMA-4.

> 
> I've not read it, but a glance at this suggests it might be worth
> reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Attachment

> 
> | Any help people can give me regarding my hard drive problem will be helpful.
> 
> All these were shots in the dark.  Good luck!
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