ide connections......

[Scotsdude]

Heyup,

I'm running a Duron 950 at home on a Gigabyte GA7VTXE.
At the moment, i've got a 10Gb hdd with a cd-rom on ide 0 and a cd-rw on ide 1. i'm trying to put both cd devices on ide 1 but my standard cd drive won't work. in fact, it stops the machine from booting. no bios, nowt. i've checked the jumper setings, even removed the cdrw and just left the cd drive on ide 1, but nothing works.
It's not essential that I get this to work, I'm just puzzled as to why it isn't. The computer performs well enough as is, but i'd like to see what sort of difference it would make.
Any ideas?

Scotsdude

 

[TheGrey]

make sure you are using a ide cable with 80 wires
the newer ide controllers are quite picky about that

 

[Scotsdude]

think i am. pretty sure i'm using the cables that came with the board. i'll check tonight anyway.

Scotsdude

 

[paparazi]

I think this board just comes with one 80 core ultra ATA66 cable and a standard floppy.
For cheapness they expect you to wire the hard drive and rom device together!!!!!!
Don't do this! instead use the fine 80 ultra cable with the hard drive, on it's own! Primary channel IDE0 as master, (putting a rom device with the hard drive will kill hard drive performance).
You can buy a cheap 40 core (course IDE cable) for the rom devices, to put them on the secondary IDE channel., as master and slave. Martin Vote if you found this post helpful please!!

 

[ceh4702]

Just pull one CDROM out and make it master by changing the jumpers. Some CDROM's like to be on cable select. However if you set the pins on one to be master that will probably solve the problem.

I don't think it matters where you put the IDE devices. The computer is designed to run 4 ide devices. I like just having one cdrom and one harddrive on one cable because you get better airflow in the case. If you have 3 devices something has to give. I imagine to copy a CD fast the image is copied to the harddrive and then copied to the CDR/W. The software that enables you to copy a CD has to be on the harddrive, so you need 3 drives to be used all at once.

It takes a lot longer to read data on a drive than it does to send it along the bus. Usually the drive fills up its own cache and then sends the data in a burst while it keeps reading. A CPU spends a lot of time just sitting around waiting doing nothing. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[cdogg]

ceh4702,

Modern CDROM drives typically use the ATA/33 or ATA/66 standard. Most hard drives from the last 2 years are ATA/66 or ATA/100 compatible. You generally don't want to have an slower device running on the same IDE channel as a faster device. The faster device will be forced to use the slower protocol.

So, unless you know that both you're CDROM and HD are using the same standard and you're secondary IDE channel is already full, then you should never have them both on the same channel - especially in your case ceh4702 where you have a free IDE channel.