Hard Drive Question.

[TerrorX]

Every now and then and always on boot up when the drive is cold, I turn on the computer and the master and slave hard drives are not detected by the bios. My concern is that it is the controller in my ECS K7S5A mother board I installed but the problem has just crept up on me Ive had this mainboard for about a month now and have just started experiencing this problem. The drive set up I have in the system is a master slave setup with the master being a western digital 6gb drive and the slave being a maxtor 8gb drive they are older drives, and like I stated earlier at times I boot up and the computer has set in the off posistion a considerable amount of time the drive fails to start. I can eventually get the computer to load and once the drive is on for awhile I can not duplicate this symptom as hard as I try, could this be a motor on the drive itself not spinning up or something, any suggestions will be appreciated. :confused:

[Wolfe]

Hopefully it just indicates that your BIOS is going through the POST too quickly and is missing the HD detection. You might try slowing down the boot by enabling Boot Up Floppy Seek and/or DISabling Quick Power-on Self Test. This should slow down the boot process and allow your drives to come up to speed.

If the HD is having trouble getting the platters to *physically* spin up, however, you should backup everything you have immediately and start saving for a new HD.

BTW, if you've recently added a new device that draws a decent amount of power from the P/S, then your power supply may be under-powered and may not be able to handle the strain of all the devices pulling on it at startup.

- Chris

[ March 02, 2002, 01:19 PM: Message edited by: Wolfe ]

[Schrullenhaft]

Wolfe is probably correct. You could also disable Quick Boot in the CMOS/BIOS (so that it counts your memory on boot) to give the drives some time to spin up. These drives are hooked up to your onboard IDE controller correct ?

You can also detect the drives in the CMOS/BIOS instead of leaving them at AUTO setting. This will force the controller to look for the drives a bit longer (and give an error when it can't find them, though this may take much longer than an auto-detect not finding the drives).

The latest BIOS version for this board is 02/02/06, but there's no mention of any tweaks to IDE settings. You can get the BIOS update here, but you need to know if your motherboard has a built in LAN adapter or not (you can quickly go to the download page since this board is listed in the recently updated items in the upper right).