Kam Leo wrote: > > 1. Are you using Cable Select? If yes, is the hard drive located at > the end of the cable? > > I, personally, do not trust Cable Select. Not because Cable Select > does not work, but because I do not trust mixing old with new. There > old products around which do not fully comply with today's standards. > On any drive on an IDE chain I make sure that jumpers are used to > configure the master and slave device. I recommend that you do the > same. > > 2. Move the optical drive to the secondary IDE channel. Make it the > master. Yes, use a jumper. Any interference in operation between the > hard drive and the optical will be removed and in the process you will > improve the data transfer between the optical and hard drive. > > Hi Kam, Thanks for the suggestions. If memory serves, the drives are jumpered as you suggest. In any case, they are both being correctly recognized by the BIOS. The hard drive is at the end of the cable and is the master; the optical drive is on the middle of the cable and is the slave. The hard drive is 3 years old and supports cable select. The barebones system and the optical drive are new. So, I suppose I could change the jumpers, but I would be flabbergasted if they were the cause of the problem. There is only one IDE connector on the mother board. (There are two SATA connectors that are going unused, though.) Short of getting an IDE controller and installing it on the PCI bus, I cannot put the optical drive on a different IDE channel than the hard drive. OTOH, this system does not have to be optimized for speed. It's just going to run some servers for me. So, the optical drive will be used only rarely, and then mostly for installing software. (Backups go to disks on a different system.) Debbie
