Can bad IDE2 Controller be bypassed?

[Lscman]

My father has a 1996 vintage Pentium 100 machine he uses for internet. It suddenly shows I/O and Controller failure messages on bootup and bootup is sluggish. Ribbon cable was changed. The motherboard seems OK except it can't find the hard drive. I tried 5 different drives from other PC's with same result. Can I install a new PCI slot Controller to bypass the problem? Will this eliminate the IDE error, assuming no drives are connected to it? Someone suggested changing the battery, but I haven't purchased one yet. Any opinions are appreciated.

[whocares]

Sure. Just disable the onboard IDE in the BIOS and install a controller

[XT]

Do you have 2 ide connectors/channels? If so, try connecting the the hard drive to that and see what happens, then connect the cd rom to it via the second connector, make sure it set for slave if it was the only thing riding ide 2



Chris

[Psycho Logical]

If you have only two IDE devices, disable the secondary controller in BIOS setup, and put them both on one cable connected to channel #1. Set the HD jumper to master (or master with slave present if necessary) and set the CD jumper as slave. Connect the HD to the far end of the cable, and the CD to the middle connector.

If you're going to add a separate controller, check the manual to make sure the system fully complies with all the PCI specs first. Some older systems did not.

Of course, a new battery would be a lot cheaper first step. Couldn't hurt to try it.

[Lscman]

Thanks for advices. As a followup, will my old C drive with win98 adapt to the card and perform as the bootable device? It is a 30 G Western Digital single partition fat table drive that had EZ-Bios installed on it, since my computer's Bios only supports 8G drives. Will the EZ-Bios freak out the controller card or cause the hard drive to misfunction and require reformatting or reinstalling of all software?

[Psycho Logical]

You need to do some further investigation first.

However you do it on that particular system, you should get into the BIOS setup program and look through all the available options. Make sure there is one to completely disable both the onboard IDE ports. Then also be sure that you have the option in the boot sequence to be able to boot from a device other than one that is attached directly to the motherboard. Many add-on controllers require that you configure the boot sequence to boot from an external and/or a SCSI device, even though the add-on card is not actually a SCSI card.

As for the EZ-BIOS software already installed, it may very well conflict with a new controller. That may be something you will only find out after you install the card. Even if you can use the drive that way, you would get better performance without using overlay software. But that means uninstalling it, which can be a pain and/or sometimes requires re-formatting the drive.

[Lscman]

PL,

Thanks for your opinion. Maybe I can find out how to uninstall EZBios on the Western Digital web site. If not, I have a spare hard disk I can FDISK and install win98 on. Then, perhaps I can install my ole' EZBios C: drive as a temporary drive D and copy it's valuable files to C before reformatting it.

[BigBlue66]

I always thought that in order to get rid of the DDO, all data on the drive would be lost. Could be wrong.

[JeepLoverºllllº]

Lscman,
I had recently experienced a similar problem when I installed a DVD drive, and I have found that you have to make sure that you have the right "kind" of IDE cable installed for that particular drive. A high speed hard drive, or DVD drive requires an 80 pin cable, where as an older hard drive or standard CD ROM drive only requires a 40 pin cable. Both kind of cables have the same connector terminals on them, the difference is in the amount of wires that are in the ribbons. The 80 pin cable will have more wires in it, and will have a finer rib look to it, where as the 40 pin cable will have a coarse look to it. Hope this helps.

BTW, you also have to make sure that if the drive does NOT require DMA. If DMA is enabled, your system also will not boot correctly.

[Lscman]

The machine croaked after working flawlessly for months & hardware is unchanged. The "smoother" cables have ground shielding with double the wires to provide better noise suppression which permits higher speeds. The old hard drive cables will work in a Pentium for connection to a backward compatible ATA/DMA hard drive. It will simply run at the low IDE 33MHz bus speed. I believe the number of connector pins (40) for IDE, EIDE, DMA and ATA is the same in all cases. I can see how an unshielded 1990 vintage IDE cable would not allow enough speed to run a DVD movie in real time.

I am not clear on the DMA enable/disable issue you expressed concern about. I used the "auto install" wizard for formatting and installing Western Digital EZBios and I'm guessing it's in the right mode. I think my 1995 vintage win 98 machine should work with any popular, backward compatible $99 hard drive.