Adding a hard drive

Thu Dec 28 15:27:32 UTC 2006

The hard drive was rescued. It is working order and is now an NTFS partition in 
an external enclosure. What seemed to lead to the bizarre errors mentioned 
earlier was that it was partially formatted. I initially formatted it under 
Windows, but stopped it in the middle (it was internal at the time) because it 
was going so slowly. Abysmally slow. I thought something was wrong, but it 
seemed that I left it in such a state that I could not format it into anything 
else -- not even in Linux.

There were a number of other changes to my box at the time. All of my tapes 
were replaced by rounded IDE (P-ATA) cables which I had no prior experience 
with, and drives were re-arranged in the box so that the two DVD drives could 
be hooked up on the same data cable. I did this while trying to remember how 
they were hooked up on the cables -- the only change linux saw was that 
/dev/hdf was now /dev/hdg -- a minor problem. Windows didn't seem to re-letter 
anything at all.

Adding the hard 320 GB disk to my expansion card (which had been sitting there 
with one open channel until now) also caused what seemed to be IRQ conflicts -- 
at first with my network card (changing slots on the network card fixed this), 
then it seemed that for some reason my mouse froze (actually, I can't be sure 
what caused the mouse to freeze, since it un-froze after rebooting).

While the drive (the Seagate) was in the box, it eventually went un-detected, 
and could not be seen under any unoccupied /dev/hd* drive letter. This was 
after I made Linux partitions on the drive. I took it out of the box, and 
placed it inside a USB external hard drive. In Linux, I eliminated the 
partitions and replaced it with a single "Windows 95 32-bit" (0xC) partition. 
>From there, I could format it in Windows XP. Under Win XP, it was only possible 
to format it as an NTFS partition. No other option was offered (maybe it's the 
size ...?). This took nearly two hours.in an external USB 2.0 drive box.

Once made, moving about 700 MB worth of files took over 10 minutes. THis 
compares with moving 18 GB of files to an internal drive, which also took 10 
minutes. Media files take longer to start on the external drive. Formatting an 
another internal 320 GB drive took 1 hour, which I still think is slow, but I 
don't know what it is due to. It is not often I format NTFS, so maybe they just 
take longer to format ...?

But anyway, NTFS wasn't quite what I wanted, but there comes a point that I 
become afraid to do further experiementing, since at some point I have to use 
the computer for serious reasons, and it is better to leave well enough alone.

Hoping that Linux one day can safely write to NTFS ...

Paul King

On 25 Dec 2006 at 19:13, Paul King wrote:

> Hello
> 
> Thanks for the help, guys!
> 
> I did an analysis (hooking up just the hard drive and adding the rest later), 
> and I now suspect that this new HD I bought is toast -- quite likely a 
> manufacturer's defect.
> 
> The drive has gone from "being seen" by the bios (and not being able to do 
> anything with it) to not being seen (which is now the current status).
> 
> Paul King
> 
> On 24 Dec 2006 at 9:26, Paul King wrote:
> 
> > 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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