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big help required with old system

K

Kill_Phil

Golden Member
allright, this old system is a ibm 6381. it has a 500mb maxtor hard drive that is giving me no greif.

its one hella fast 486, has 16 megs of some type of ram, might be edo.. and a built in video card with a whole meg of addon video memory.

now, the problem comes when i tried to add a cd rom to this rig. the system will boot fine when i have just the hard drive in, and set to master. but when i add the cd rom and set it to slave it wont recognise either. when i set the cdrom to master it recognises the cdrom but not the hard drive. and then there is some third setting for the cdrom that has CS on it and it reconises the cdrom and not the hdd with that on to (i think its autodetect mode).

so i ripped the hard drive out and set it to slave, then set the cdrom to master. it reconises the cdrom still, but not the hard drive.

then i updated to the latest bios (which did jack $hit as far as i can tell) the readme file said it fixed some error with the cdrom but i wasent having this error in the first place. this motherboard also has only 1 ide channel, but it should still be able to use both a hard drive and a cdrom on the 1 channel...

i have a brand new ide cable that im using for it and i also tried using the old one that was in it and neither change this condition. ive ran a diagnostic utility, and all that did was tell me the parts that were connected and working, it also did not detect the hard drive with any of the above configurations.

now my question i suppose would be, do you think its the cdrom (brand new samsung 32x), the hard drive, or the ide bus on the motherboard only supports 1 device that is causing this nasty problem??

please help, because i would like to get this system up and running for my aunt and we are willing to replace the hard drive (would have to shell out $100 for a used 4gig quantum fireball but thats ok) if we have to replace the motherboard there is a pentium 100 in the paper for $250 that we will probably go with

Edited the formatting
 
Don't know about IBMs, but some HDs (Western Digital, for one) have different jumper settings for Master with Slave than they do for Master with no Slave.
 
this drive has a label on the back that shows the jumper settings for master, and for slave. it shows no mention of master with slave but i will look into it as that seems like a realistic problem, thx
 
i checked the maxtor site
http://www.maxtor.com/downloads/pub/ide/7420av.txt
and it says i have it jumpered properly for either a master in a single drive system or a master in a dual drive system (both the same setting)
so i really dont understand what the problem could be other than maby it means dual hard drive when it says dual drive system but a cd-rom is a drive too and it should work fine. the only thing i can think is that it must be the ide bus.

any more suggestions are appriceated, thanks.
 
OK, you probably have done all this, but this is what I would do:

Set HD as master, CD as slave.

Make sure HD is connected to the last connector on IDE cable. Make sure CD is connected to the middle connector on IDE cable.

Make sure the IDE cable is connected with pin 1 orientation correct on mobo (or drive controller card), and on the HD and CD. Pin 1 on the IDE connector for the HD and CD is always on the side closest to the power connector. You're on your own at the controller connection.

Go into BIOS and see if anything needs attention there. On my old 486, it's not smart enough to automatically figure out the drive configuration has changed, you have to tell it.

If you do all this, and it still doesn't work, get a big hammer and pound the $h!t out of it, and then buy your aunt a new computer.
 
Only other thing I can think of, offhand, is checking the MB BIOS settings and make sure that detect setting for both drives is Auto.
 
ok, that computer was A$$, but i gave it the frankenstein treatment. went out and got a cheap-o motherboard\cpu that has onboard vid and sound, and a 2 gig hdd, and salvaged whatever i could from the old 486. boy will my aunt be happy when i figure out why the modem isint working, but thats for another thread 😉
 
It's a shame you bought the new stuff. On the old mobos, you should set the CD-ROM (slave) on primary or master on secondary to NONE in the Bios. The autodetection worked only for Harddrives. None is fine the Cd-Rom will be recognized.
 
there was next to no way to setup for a cdrom in the bios, if it dident autodetect it, there wasent anything i could do. i even updated with the newest bios (the IBM site rules for that type of thing btw) its not really a shame since that computer is a dinosaur and barely able to run windows 3.1.... they wanted me to put windows 95 on it
 
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