New Computer... Old HDD

[Gandalph]

This is a new one on me. I've never come across this before.

My friend down the road took one look at my computer last week and was totally taken by it. So we decided over the last week to buy the bits from the same people that I bought mine from and glue it together so he would have a machine ready for vista coming out. The build went fine everything worked well on first boot, no problems at all apart from the fact that we found out the case had no speaker in it when I was looking for the leads to plug into the MB. Must have been a Monday factory assembly job, not to worry we will sort that one later as we still get the POST beep through the external speakers. Now to the problem.

He has a Western Digital 40 Gig HDD that he decided he wanted to put in as a backup drive for his Documents and whatever. I fitted this drive and set the jumper to CSEL and booted it up. Nothing showed under My Computer. Must mention at this point that I set the jumper on the Master drive to CSEL before installing the OS, no problems on boot-up. I then decided to set the jumpers on the Western Digital to Slave and booted up. No detection. I then set the jumper on the Master drive to Master, still would not detect the second (Western Digital) drive on boot-up. Then I discovered that irrespective of whether the second drives jumper is set to Slave or CSEL it will be detected after the machine has been running for about fifteen minutes, closed down then restarted.

My conclusion is that the Western Digital (which is just over two years old) is slow to spin up and needs replacing.

What does the panel think?

[nellie2]

I don't pretend to know what I'm talking about because I don't really, but Western Digital Hdd's have something called PM2 mode.... if it isn't supported by the bios then that can cause detection problems apparently. Click here

Edit: page 22 mentions it

[Gandalph]

Thanks for the reply Nellie.

I have got the original WD book that came with his HDD and have been reading through it this afternoon. It goes on about If the HDD was formatted previously on another machine, alternative jumper settings and it goes on and on about this that and the other but there is nothing there that I can see that will solve our problem. As for the PM 2 Mode, there is nothing mentioned in the ASUS handbook or Website (that I have come across) about it. I am going to look into this now. My advice this afternoon was to dump the WD drive and put a new Seagate in the machine. I can get a 160 Gig for £39.00.

Thank you for your input Nellie, much appreciated.

Just looked at the PDF briefly Nellie and it looks as though it is for SATA Drives. I should have mentioned the the drives I had put in are ATA 100. Funnily enough though the pin setting on the SATA diagram are exactly the same as the slave settings on the ATA drive.

Thanks again.

[Gandalph]

Today before we fired his machine up I connected a Molex Y power splitter to the lead connected to the Seagate 200 Gig drive and powered both drives by that. The theory being that we know the Seagate is recognised straight away so if it was a power problem with the lead to the Western Digital then that would be eradicated by the Y connector. Still no luck. The Western Digital drive still was not seen at boot-up, I let the machine run for about ten minutes and powered it down for about forty seconds, re-powered and the western digital was then seen as drive D.

I think this is a case of slow spin-up so it's going to get the zero writing experience and then into the bin.

[styxxxone]

You need to set the jumpers on both hard drives to csel.

AKA. Cable Select -- SM