HDs not being detected (sometimes) on bootup

[LSUEskimo]

II'm not sure what type of hardware info might be relavent. I'll post what I have so far. I have an Ultra133TX2 PCI card with 3 hard drives installed, all Maxtor, with sizes of 29GB, 57GB, and 152GB on D0, D1, and D2, respectively. Sometimes I will reboot and hear the pc speaker beep when the pci card is being detected. When it does, not all of the drives will be detected. Usually it will only be the 152GB drive. Does anybody have a clue as to why this would be?

 

[vietofmars]

The drives might not be spinning up fast enough to be detected. Usually the mobo bios has a quick boot option and disabling that will give your hard disks time to spin up. Don't know if that will help with your PCI ata controller card.

 

[lucky9]

another thing to try will be to reinstall the driver for the card. i run an tx100 without ever a problem. love it.

 

[LSUEskimo]

I'll check the quick startup and if it continues, I'll reinstall the drivers. Thanks for the help. I'll reply as to the status of the fix. Thx.

 

[dude]

This should have nothign to do with the drivers nor the drives spinning up. This should be right after the post screen, right?

I'd check to make sure your IDE cables are up to no good. Are they standard 80 conductor 40-pin cables? Try to see if swapping the cable will work. Another thing is make sure these cables are standard length. They should be no longer than 18" long. If you're using round IDE cables, try using a flat ribbon cable as the rounding of the cables kinda beats the purpose of the extra 40 wires for noise reduction...

 

[LSUEskimo]

They are flat, but they are 24" long. The 18" cables will not reach.

 

[Unforgiven]

i had the same issue but my problem was only when i put my dvd rom or cd rom on the ata 133 card. it would find the rom's but only find the hard drive 1 out of every 5 boots or so. i also had it happen on one hard drive that was only an ata 66 drive and i took it off the chain and connected it to the mobo and never had the issue again. if i were you i would take the drives out 1 by 1 and see if 1 of the drives throws the whole thing off so at least you can know if you are dealing with just 1 drive or the entire set of 3.