IDE issues <consolidated responses from several sources>

[Phoenician]

<snip>
>From Brian:

> Check the jumper settings on the HD?
>  (Bad jumper settings can potentially damage both the PC and the HD)

I had the HD set to master, then I tried cable select.

> Try a known good cable?

Did that.  I pulled a cable and a different cd-rom from one of my many spare
pcs.  Same thing.

> Check the jumper settings on the MB?

We called ourselves doing that several times. I have to say though, this
Intel MB has lousy documentation.

<snip>

>From CDowns:
>yep 1 of 2 things, the cpu power is not set correct ( jumper wise ) or
>the power supply power is not on the right voltage.

No jumper settings. This board was made specifically for a P4.

<snip>

>From Jason Clinton

>Tried turning off power management in the BIOS? And you're not
>pluging/unpluging while the computer is on, are you?

Power management, No we haven't tried turning it off.
Plugging/Unplugging with the power on? No no no no.  I know better than to
do that. :)

<snip>

>From Duane:

>The way you describe that, it sounds like you are hot swapping a hard
drive?
>Do you mean that the hard drive fails to start spinning when the computer
>is turned on?  Many of the new larger hard drives require special
>controllers to physically map the larger medium.  Since the number of pins
>used to select the address and data lines stay the same, they might not be
>compatible with the older controllers.  The 160GB drive I got came with
>its own controller and works like a champ.

No, we're not hot swapping the HD. The HD and CD-Rom both fail to spin up
when the pc is powered up
as long as the IDE cable is plugged in.  Turn off  the pc, disconnect the
IDE cable, turn it on and then
the HD and CD-Rom spin up.  I even swapped the IDE cables with known working
cables and I also swapped the
CD-Rom with one out of another system.

Thanks for everyone's input,

Michienne