I'm having problems with a system I'm playing with at home. It has the standard IDE connections
on the motherboard as well as two SATA ports. The problem I'm having is that I can't get both
SATA drives to be detected. I'm booting from the IDE system drive, along with having a IDE CD
drive as a secondary master.

The boot screen displays the standard 'detecting IDE drives' messages:
Primary Master: blah blah
Primary Slave: blah
Secondary Master: blah
Secondary Master: blah

Then it posts a message like this:

IDE hub 5
IDE hub 6


Is there a limitation as to how IDE and SATA drives can be mixed? Any suggestions are
appreciated.

Funker wrote:
Stuff it would be nice to know:

1) motherboard make/model number or
2) computer make and model number (if a Dell/HP/Gateway etc)

plus

3) what OS are you using ?

Paul

"Funker" <cfunk@nospam.net> wrote in message newsp.t6q9p5jp6tkqj7@funk2...

Go into the bios and look at the settings. Then for the SATA channel that's
currently not detecting a drive...
try setting it to "auto" if it's not already set that way.

That should do it...but if it still does not detect a drive,
then switch the two SATA drives around and you can then ascertain if the
problem is a dead harddrive
or an SATA channel failure.

(May also be the cable itself.)

"Funker" <cfunk@nospam.net> wrote in message newsp.t6q9p5jp6tkqj7@funk2...
Maybe your power supply can't cope with 6 drives - that is quite a lot!

On Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:34:07 -0000, "GT"
<ContactGT_remove_@hotmail.com> wrote:

So what exactly does this mean? Please be very specific
from now on. Does it mean the same drive is always detected
and the other isn't? Does it mean sometimes both are
detected but usually not? Does it mean sometimes one drive
and other times only the other drive is detected? Does it
matter if you switch the cables so each drive is connected
to the other SATA port?


Ok, but it shouldn't matter. Assuming you boot windows (?),
does Device Manager show the SATA ports and/or the connected
drives?

Try enabling the full diagnostics/tests/check memory, etc,
the bios settings to do the full POST-time testing instead
of only a quick boot mode, _then_ see if giving the system
this extra time allows the drives to be consistently
detected. Also try unplugging one drive and seeing if the
other is detected, and vice-versa, and then swapping cables
around and motheboard ports the cables are plugged into.

Keep swapping around different combination of drive, cable
and motherboard port. See if any combination always works
or always fails. Reduce variables like this and if nothing
else works, try the drives on another system and see if the
motherboard has a bios update addressing drive issues.



It's certainly possible an overwhelmed PSU can cause drives
to fail to spin up or otherwise malfunction, but there was
one PATA HDD, one PATA CD, and two SATA "drives", meaning at
most there are 3 HDDs which isn't all that much of a load,
plus if we understand the situation right it seems only the
drives on SATA ports are effected, suggesting it could be
more likely which ports are used or the mechanical
connections.

If the PSU is of insufficient capacity I would think it
similarly overextended even if there were only one HDD, in
that it will not last long term running at such a peak load.

Checking the voltage, 12V rise-time during system power on
is certainly one thing to do (with a multimeter, there's no
way to effectively get into a bios menu in time to see
that), but otherwise I would check the bios menu for the
SATA drive settings, check the drives with the corresponding
manufacturer's utilities, and unplug/inspect/replug the data
and power cables.

"kony" <spam@spam.com> wrote in message
news:hjhlr3hjpd0flc7vci44gotaf7s0vms1pp@4ax.com...
His question is a little vague!

I have only seen the original post that stated 4 IDE devices and 4 SATA
devices = 6 devices, which I assumed were drives. I would suggest unplugging
the power to the 4 IDE devices and then power up and see what the POST
reports.

Perhaps the PSU has been over-extended for too long and is now starting to
fail. As you know, spin up draw more power than constant running, so perhaps
one is just failing to start.

On Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:42:56 -0000, "GT"
<ContactGT_remove_@hotmail.com> wrote:


There doesn't seem to be 4 IDE devices, there seems to be 5
blahs! LOL. Quality information is hard to come by these
days.

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:05:16 -0600, Funker <cfunk@nospam.net> wrote:


Sorry for the lack in info. I'm running windows XP with one IDE HD (system drive) and one IDE CD drive. I am attempting to connect two SATA drives.

I'm at work but I'll try and get the motherboard model in the next while.

Thanks for the troubleshooting tips already provided.

Funker wrote:
Some early SATA-equipped systems did odd things with them in BIOS --
emulation modes and such and sometimes it took a bit of fiddling to make
sense of it all. But if you have two SATA ports it seems likely that you
can get both of them working. Old Shuttle MBs were so odd with SATA that
they actually had you using jumpers to enable/disable the SATA ports
which caused them to substitute for IDE channels although I can't
remember the specifics now.

--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com