I've got a great problem for you guys. It's regarding my Fred Flintstone computer. Yep Fred Flintstone! I call it such because its an oldy but goody. The motherboard is a biostar u8668-d. Its my kids computer and worked fine until recently. I'm not all that computer literate but i've decided to take an interest in the pc becuase the worst thing that could happen is me needing to get another pc. Here goes. I turn Fred on and I Freeze up at Detecting IDE Drives. Now I had 2 hard drives, 1 cd player & 1 dvd burner. If I remove all the ribbons from the motherboard, the pc tells me I have no drives connected. If I plug in the cd or dvd player only and restart the pc reads them but if connect either HD I get stuck at Detecting IDE drives. Now I've switched the pins on the HD to master/slave and am pretty sure they are in the same position as when the pc was working correctly. Please help me make sure first that all my pins or jumpers are in their correct positions. Will someone please save Fred.
I would try connecting one of the hard drives to the port & cable you are using for the DVD drives...if it works, then you know the problem is either the port or the cable. In this case, hook up the hard drive to the DVD drive port, using the cable that was connected to the hard drive orriginaly. Hopefully, it will fail to load and you will know that you just need a new cable.
hit <del> to get in the bios and turn off the "auto detect hdd" setting.. it's under advanced cmos settings.. they will be "auto" so what you need to do is go to the right hand side and use the auto detect thing there.. which will give you the right details for the drives, then possibly go back and manually add that data to the drive configs in the basic cmos settings .. often to be able to add large drives you have to use the "user defined" setting and add the numbers yourself... then when it looks right remember to save and exit.. then try a reboot and see if that does the trick.. sometimes this is a sign the cmos battery has died and the bios is resetting to default every time.. often just letting it sit stalled for 20 minutes will unstick the detection and normal service is resumed.. till next power down........
A bad drive on the IDE cable will do that, So will a faulty ground in the cable itself. if the IDE cable is a 40/40 i would blame the IDE cable. this is an old 40\1 cable this is what a 40\40 looks like but to be safe unhook everything besides your primary HDD and see if it recognizes it, then add another device to the cable, then another until there not being recognized anymore. and if i had to blame a device i would blame the DVD-rom drive
In my experience, the 80 wire cables were a lot more fragile than the 40 wire cables...even when the 40 wire cables were older.
that's what im saying the 40 ground 40 leads wires is super thin if the insulation cracks it will cause cross talk.
Okay i don't think you see where im Coming from there are 40 grounds and 40 leads=80 Wires or 40/40 as i call it The old Cable had 40 leads and 1 ground or 40/1 as i call it i gave a picture for each of the cables so you could identify them. The thiner one with 40 ground and 40 leads are more likely to crack causing crosstalk *Edit* i see what i did i posted the description on top of the picture sorry ill fix that
