[Gllug] [OT] Hardware problem

[Walter Stanish]

> It only reports the DVD drive as present.

Some possibilities as follows.

If you are recycling a CDROM and sharing a PATA cable, then many of
the PATA CDROM drives used to have their jumpers set to force master
or slave.  In this case, yours may be set to force slave.  The
default (no jumpers) tends to be 'cable select', which means that
if you plug a single (multi-device) PATA cable in to both a disk
and a CDROM it may refuse to see one of them entirely.  Removing
the jumper could fix it instantly.  If not, then removing the jumper
and swapping the order of the CD/HDD on the cable may work.

If you are using dedicated cables, then I would suggest unplugging
all IDE/SATA devices except the problem disk.  If BIOS is unable to
see it using a power cable that another drive works with, and a
PATA port that another drive works with, and removing jumpers doesn't
help, then hold the disk when it's powered on.  If it doesn't spin
up then you have a power problem or dead disk.  If it does spin
up but the BIOS doesn't see it then you may have a cable issue
(there were a few types of PATA cables produced, IIRC UDMA/66 or
something required a nicer cable... older cables were incapable,
and your drive firmware maybe doesn't like the fact .. pretty
long shot here).

Safest option is always a dedicated cable to each PATA device.

- Walter
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