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Hard drive goes undetected when 4th IDE device is hooked up

C

chrisms

Diamond Member
I just got a new CD burner and am having trouble installing it. Here is how my computer has been set up and working for the past year:

1st setup: Primary master is 13.6gb HD
Primary slave is CD-ROM

2nd setup: Primary master is 13.6gb HD
primary slave is cd-rom
secondary master is 80gb hd

Now I learned that it isn't good to have a CD-Rom and hard drive hooked up together, so I tried doing this:

Primary master: 13.6gb HD (this is where windows is installed)
Primary slave: 80gb hd
Secondary master: CDRW
Secondary slave: CD-ROM

With this setup, the computer won't detect the 13.6gb hard drive. I've switched the cables in numerous combinations, the only difference I get is sometimes the 80gb HD won't be detected instead of the 13.6gb one. Trying to boot without the original CD-ROM doesn't work, it tells me to insert system disk (even after I took the CD-ROM out of the boot-up process).

Is there a reason my computer won't take 4 IDE devices?
 
Double check the jumpers on the drives.....sometimes the 2nd drive needs to be set to slave.....and sometimes it needs to be set to cable select. Also try a new IDE cable.
 
Originally posted by: chrisms
Now I learned that it isn't good to have a CD-Rom and hard drive hooked up together
Click to expand...
That is not necessarily true. In your situation, it is not true. There are two situations in which that statement is true. One, when you have one HDD and one CD-ROM they should be put on separate cables. Two, if you have one HDD and two CD-ROM drives the CD drives should be placed on the same cable. However, it is much more important for hard drives to be on separate cables if there is more than one present in the system.

On top of all that, it doesn't really matter in the end. Unless you have an ATA33 or possibly an ATA66 controller, you are not going to be constrained. This is because current HDDs cannot usually sustain more than 50MB/s transfer rates. This means that even with two HDDs on the same ATA100/133 controller, the bandwidth is still there. Burst transfers are the only reason for any performance degradation. Also, for the bandwidth to be constrained, both HDDs would have to be transferring significant amounts of data; this usually is not the case.

Anyway, my point is, you should leave your system how you had it in the "2nd setup." Just put the CDRW drive as the secondary slave. You should be good to go. If you really want to be a stickler, then put your CD-RW drive on the primary IDE cable as a slave, and put your CD-ROM drive on the secondary IDE cable as a slave. However, I doubt you will notice a performance difference either way.

Another piece of information you should remember: don't put a CD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive on the same IDE cable. This is so you can copy a CD "on the fly" without having to first put an image on your hard drive and burn that. Your CD-RW probably has burn-proof technology of some kind making my suggestion moot. However, it is still a good idea to do that.

Make sure to check all the jumper settings on the backs of the drives. That is something I often forget to do because it is such a basic procedure.
 
It's not neccesarily a horrible thing to have a CD drive and an optical drive on the same cable, it depends on how they are typically used. Only one device can use the IDE bus at one time, so typically you do not want to have devices that frequently talk to each other on the same cable. I.E. having the boot drive and the cd-rom on the same cable will lower performance when installing programs to that hard drive. Having the two optical drives on the same channel will likewise affect performance when copying CDs while having two hard drives will affect performance from drive to drive copying. Which configuration is right for you depends totally on what tasks you tend to do with your drives. Some drives are picky about channels, particularly CD burners, which often like to be installed as secondary master for some odd reason. The only trouble I have gotten from such drives is that the transfer rate sometimes drops from DMA to PIO when not on the specified channel configuration.

P.S. Check the jumpers on those hard drives.😀
 
Thanks for the replies.

I followed Bovinicus's advice on the setup. As of now, the computer detects both hard drives but still only the original CD-ROM is detected in My Computer. However, a big step has been made in that the CDRW drive opens and closes. I'll try geting Windows to find it.
 
Computer still wants to reject a 4th IDE device... the CDRW goes undetected on boot even though the light is flashing and it is attempting to read a CD.
 
Originally posted by: Bovinicus
Originally posted by: chrisms
Now I learned that it isn't good to have a CD-Rom and hard drive hooked up together
Click to expand...
That is not necessarily true. In your situation, it is not true. There are two situations in which that statement is true. One, when you have one HDD and one CD-ROM they should be put on separate cables. Two, if you have one HDD and two CD-ROM drives the CD drives should be placed on the same cable. However, it is much more important for hard drives to be on separate cables if there is more than one present in the system.

On top of all that, it doesn't really matter in the end. Unless you have an ATA33 or possibly an ATA66 controller, you are not going to be constrained. This is because current HDDs cannot usually sustain more than 50MB/s transfer rates. This means that even with two HDDs on the same ATA100/133 controller, the bandwidth is still there. Burst transfers are the only reason for any performance degradation. Also, for the bandwidth to be constrained, both HDDs would have to be transferring significant amounts of data; this usually is not the case.

Anyway, my point is, you should leave your system how you had it in the "2nd setup." Just put the CDRW drive as the secondary slave. You should be good to go. If you really want to be a stickler, then put your CD-RW drive on the primary IDE cable as a slave, and put your CD-ROM drive on the secondary IDE cable as a slave. However, I doubt you will notice a performance difference either way.

Another piece of information you should remember: don't put a CD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive on the same IDE cable. This is so you can copy a CD "on the fly" without having to first put an image on your hard drive and burn that. Your CD-RW probably has burn-proof technology of some kind making my suggestion moot. However, it is still a good idea to do that.

Make sure to check all the jumper settings on the backs of the drives. That is something I often forget to do because it is such a basic procedure.
Click to expand...

get off whatever you're smoking, boy. 😉

1) with UltraDMA now, an optical drive and an HDD on the same IDE chain does not affect transfer rates at all. and also, two devices cannot transfer on the same IDE cable at the same time, this is why we have Master/Slave configurations - only one will transfer at a time, the Master takes precedence. You're not going to have problems with saturating the IDE bus, quite simply because the design of the interface prevents that by its very nature. (Oh, right, and make sure you enable UDMA, as opposed to PIO, because UDMA >>>>> PIO 🙂 )
2) a CD-RW and another optical drive on the same IDE chain won't matter - the data can't actually be copied on-the-fly, anyways, and to have it copied onto the hard drive and then to the CD-R(w), you would have to check it off, and no matter what your configuration is, it would still copy the ENTIRE contents over the HDD, THEN to CD-R(w).
3) assuming you have UltraDMA (correct me if I'm wrong in what hardware and settings support this), just set your drives to cable select. 🙂

it sounds like your new drive is fubar. I bought a CD-RW and DVD-ROM when I was building this computer that I have now, and the DVD drive I recieved originally caused everything else on the same IDE chain to go blank. If I put it on the same chain as the cd-rw drive (either in master or slave), neither of them would work, and if I put it on the same chain as my WD HDD, then the system would simply not boot because the HDD could not be initialized. I RMA'd it, and got back a superior product 🙂D) and it worked fine.
 
give the following a try...Set all drives to CS, masters at end of cables and slaves in the middle. Nothing to lose.
 
I don't have any "cable select" options... I going into setup and detecting the drive but it still wouldn't work.

Could the CDRW still be broken even if I got it working before, with one hard drive going undetected?
 
I've had this same problem and it was always cables and jumpers.

One thing I learned recently is that for 80 wire DMA cables the master has to go on the end connector - not the middle. Apparently with 40 wire you can do it either way but master on the end is still better
 
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