[Gllug] BIOS not detecting IDE hdrives

[Russell Howe]

On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 04:45:14PM +0100, john gennard wrote:
> I've tried all possible combinations - what I know is the
> 'good' drive is seen by the various Distros whether as
> Master or Slave, but the BIOS says 'none'.

It obviously varies from BIOS to BIOS - I think all my PCs have Award
BIOSes, and the options for the HD type are 'None', the ancient numeric
types, a manual setting or 'Auto' (from memory...)

You can also run the HDD autodetect stuff and it will put the manual
setting on with the (hopefully) right options.

Some more modern BIOSes than the ones I have here only seem to have
'None' or 'Auto' as options, and when you select 'Auto' it goes off and
queries the IDE device.

I also have the option to enable or disable either of the two IDE
channels (on a different BIOS screen) - if an IDE channel was marked as
disabled in the BIOS, the Linux IDE driver may well get a bit confused
if it sees what looks like an IDE channel but isn't (although I never
had a problem disabling IDE channels on my boxen - the extra IRQ was
handy at times too).

What about trying a different IDE cable? Dodgy cabling can cause all
sorts of errors which make no logical sense.

The PSU is another potential source of weirdness, although I would be
inclined to look at other things before placing too much suspicion on
that.

> I would have suspected the BIOS itself, but all changes I
> make to it are activated.

I don't understand what you mean by this, but I hope at least some of
the above is helpful (though it all sounds so odd that perhaps it won't
be)

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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