Thread: Odd harddrive behavior.

  1. #1
    The Right Honourable psychopath's Avatar
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    Odd harddrive behavior.

    I took my harddrive out of my other computer and plugged it into my main computer to copy a harddrive image onto it. I moved the drive back and forth a few times because it wasn't working (the image copy). I plugged it into the main computer again (as a slave), and this time the master harddrive didn't read properly (said it was like, 200GB. and didn't display the drive model properly. was all garbled). Made the slave harddrive master, and then it didn't read right. Put it back in it's original computer, and gets read fine by the BIOS. The master drive of the main computer is fine too, as long as that other drive isn't connected.

    Someone please tell me that it's just a bad cable. Please.
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  2. #2
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    I had similar troubles with my old ASUS P3 board. Never found out why it would not recognize drive 2 with drive 1 plugged in, but would recognize drive 2 w/o drive 1 plugged in.

    Probably a board resource conflict somewhere.

    Or it could be some super secret hardware in one of the drives that makes it only work with drives from the same manuf. But...nah...probably a board resource issue.

  3. #3
    The Right Honourable psychopath's Avatar
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    Is there any way to fix a resource conflict like this? Or would it be easier to just buy a new HDD?

    What I find odd about it, is it worked fine before (last night, actually). Then it decided for no appearent reason to give me trouble.
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  4. #4
    The Right Honourable psychopath's Avatar
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    Just tried a different drive; exact same problem.
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  5. #5
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Sorry bud I never fixed it so I don't know if you can fix it or not. I called ASUS on it and they told me one of my cards was conflicting. This was not true since there were no cards in the system except the video card (part of my troubleshooting is to always eliminate 'extra' cards). The only interrupt the video should take is int 10h which is a far cry from anything close to a harddrive IRQ.

    There is one option. If you can boot the system and get to DOS mode from Windows you could fire off some int 13h code to see if the BIOS even sees the drive. You should be able to do this even under Windows as long as you don't attempt any writing to the disk. If you do, Windows will not like it. It installs a hook in interrupt 13h that checks to see if the drive has been locked or not so if you use interrupt 13h after boot, you are actually calling MS's code and in my experience their code breaks the chain and does not ever call the original 13h handler.
    Just like MS to break their own rules.


    I bet if you attempt a low-level detection on int 13h, the drive will be there.

  6. #6
    The Right Honourable psychopath's Avatar
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    Well, I took an IDE cable out of another computer, and it worked. Detected both drives fine. Which is strange, because I tried the second drive on the IDE cable I was using for my CD and DVD drives, and it didn't work there either. Tried a few other IDE cables, and they didn't detect the slave drive at all.

    Motherboard problem? Or do I just have a box full of bad cables?
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  7. #7
    pwns nooblars
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    A little bit of A and a little bit of B me thinks.

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