New PATA Drive

Doug Hardie bc979 at lafn.org
Mon Oct 13 15:45:46 PDT 2008


On Oct 13, 2008, at 14:03, David Kelly wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 01:56:40PM -0700, Doug Hardie wrote:
>> I am encountering an issue with a new 160 GB PATA drive.  Its being
>> installed on an old system (Pentium II).  The boot process never
>> really starts.  It gets in the BIOS to where it checks for drives and
>> hangs with the message searching for the primary drive on the
>> channel.  Normally I have that disabled because the boot drive is  
>> SCSI
>> but in that situation it just hangs and there are no messages.  This
>> drive is the only device on the channel and it is jumpered for  
>> Master.
>>
>> I am suspecting that the issue is the drive ATA/100 is not falling
>> back to ATA/66/33 such that the motherboard can properly detect it.
>> Seagate does provide a utility to reset the drive back down from ATA/
>> 100 but it requires that the boot get through to run the utility.   
>> The
>> drive works fine in a Mac but the utility won't run there.  I can
>> continue to search for hardware that can boot with the drive attached
>> to run the utility or am I chasing my tail here?
>>
>> Drive:  Seagate ST3160815A
>>
>> Motherboard:  ASUS P2L97 - Manual says ATA/33 only.
>
> I have had exactly that sort of problem with a 160G Seagate drive on  
> old
> hardware. And even if it did work it would have only recognized 128G  
> due
> to hardware or BIOS limitations.

I could live with that.  The drive its replacing is only 60 GB and its  
less than 10% used.

>
>
> In the end I swapped an old HD out of another machine that was happy
> with the new drive.
>
> A CPU and motherboard that does recognize your ATA100 drive costs less
> than the HD. Perhaps its time to upgrade the MB?

Unfortunately the disk was free.  MBs are not.  I would love to  
replace the entire system for a number of reasons, but the money just  
isn't there for that.  I'll keep chasing my tail.





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