IDE Causes Boot Hang

[chinagreenelvis]

Please, please, I hope someone can help me with this.

As much as I like to think I know about computers, I'm completely confounded by this problem.

I have two IDE channels. The primary leads to a master hard drive, and a slave hard drive. The second IDE leads to a master CD ROM drive, and a slave CD ROM drive. This configuration has worked for years and nothing has changed.

Suddenly, the computer fails to boot any sort of operating system that loads CD ROM drivers if the CD ROM drives on the secondary IDE are connected, regardless of whether or not the hard drives are connected. I have tried loading a boot disk floppy without any hard drive at all, and I get the same problem.

When the floppy is loaded, and any CD ROM device is connected, the boot hangs immediately upon loading CD ROM drivers.

When loading from the HDD, the boot hangs at the very beginning of the Windows XP Professional logo screen.

When I disconnect the secondary IDE cable, or remove all devices from that cable, the operating system loads just fine and does not hang.

The CD ROM drives are all good and not defective. Neither is the secondary IDE cable.

I've tried several different BIOS configurations as well, and none of them seem to work.

Currently, both CD ROM drive jumpers are set to "Cable Select," which is how I've had them set up for the past three years.

I cannot think of any other useful information, but there must be a solution to this problem. I appreciate any help.

 

[ekÆsine]

i wouldn't be absolutely sure that your cd-rom isn't broken. you tested these cd-roms in another computer? it may be that your secondary IDE controller on the motherboard went bad.

have you tried to put only 1 cd-rom drive on the secondary controller to see which cd-rom it is hanging on or if both drives hang?

if both, try pulling the hard drive IDE cable out of the primary controller and put it on the secondary to see if the hard drives work there.

i would be more suspicious of the cd-rom drives though, i've had many optical drives do strange things that would only be fixed by using specific combination of jumper settings and placement on the IDE cable.

use master/ slave, cable select/ slave, cable select/ master, ect, and switch the drives around on the cable.

 

[chinagreenelvis]

I've tested the configuration with good CD ROM drives.

I will try testing the CD ROM devices on the primary IDE, that's a good idea.

Otherwise, how can I tell if the secondary IDE controller is bad? Can it be repaired if it is?

 

[ekÆsine]

the way i would decide that the second IDE controller is bad is if no drives work on it or if they work very unstable on it. you cannot fix it unless you are still covered by the warranty.

if not you would have to get a PCI IDE card. or just get another motherboard. the reason i ask you to test every combination first is because you should be sure where the problem is before you try to fix something.

 

[chinagreenelvis]

CD ROM devices loaded correctly on the primary IDE.

I have been experiencing other problems due to having an installation of Alchohol 120%, which creates a virtual SCSI drive on reboot. I don't know how that would affect a boot up from anything other than the HDD OS, but after removing the program and it's virtual drive, certain problems I was having (with my NVidia graphics card specifically) have dissapeared, so it's worth trying my IDE port one last time.

If it doesn't work, I'll still be lost - because the system BIOS recognizes any and all drives I connect to either IDE port, and Windows XP's hardware manager tells me that both adapters are working fine with no conflicts (although in order to load XP I've had to disconnect the secondary IDE devices, so I'm not sure how accurate this might be.)

Here goes nothing...

 

[chinagreenelvis]

Nope, that's it. That's all she wrote. My system freezes if anything is connected to the secondary IDE. BIOS settings are all correct, everything is enabled.

Damn.

 

[trebor]

I see that you have both cdroms st as cable select. Did you try to set on as master one as slave? That may clear up your problem.

 

[ekÆsine]

it would seem likely than your second IDE controller has failed. you should avoid using it and using one of the fixes for this that i mentioned. this happened to a p3 machine we have. we used a IDE card that fits into the pci slot.