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Re: OT: Damaged harddisk and/or disk controller



hi ya kjetil

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:

> For a long time, I have had problems before boot: My primary master disk 
> is sometimes not detected, and thus, the machine doesn't boot. It 
> happens about once a month, and it is completely magic to me: I usually 
> pull the power cable, fiddle a bit with the IDE cable to the primary 
> disk, reconnects and that does the trick. If these actions have an 
> effect, I really do not know, and sometimes, like this morning, a lot 
> more fiddling was required... 

i'd replace the ide cables ... with new 80 conductor cable

> What I see is that if the primary master disk isn't detected, the 
> primary slave isn't either.

that'd depend on:
	- the jumper settings on your disk
	- the manufacturer of the disk
	- the disk controller

- it is normally, supposed to find the slave disk, even if the master
  is dead or non-existent

> However, if I pull the IDE cable from the 
> primary master, the primary slave is detected.

that probably means your jumpers on the disk is not right
	- set the jumpers on the disk to be both cable select
	or explicity set master on the disk at the end of the cable
	and explicity set slave ont he disk int he middle of the cable

	using master on the middle of the cable can create whackyness

> The primary disk, a Maxtor 40 GB disk, has been a bit unreliable from 
> the start,

maybe you have a bad disk, but is it unlikely...
and also depends on where yo bought the disk from ... mom-n-pop-me-too
stores vs an iso9001 certified outfits where they supposedly don't throw
things around or do your 6' drop tests before shipping

90% of the time .. its just bad cables and jumpers or bad mb (controllers)

c ya
alvin



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