I have a weird problem with my PC, additional hard drives seem to "fall offline". What I mean is, they are no longer seen in "my computer". But the bois DOES see the drive. The drive is a western digital 250gb laptop drive, WD2500BEVE 2.5" eide drive. I am using and adapter to connect it to my ide ribbon cable. Could it be I need to set jumpers? my other four drives in the system are SATA drives and give me no issues. I also downloaded the diagnostic tools from WD and the drive checked out with ZERO errors! My mother board is an intel dg35ec and I am running Win XP. It actally has done this with Maxtor 500gb ide drives, I just assumed it was a bad drive, but I suspect it is something else. I seem to have MB drivers up to date.
My bios does not give me many options, there are Four I can change, ata/ide mode - native or legacy (set to native) Configure SATA as IDE or AHCI (set to IDE) S.M.A.R.T. enable or disable (set to enable) Hard Disk Pre-Delay that can be set between 1-30 seconds (set to NO) I am going to try legacy mode in ata/ide and see if that helps. update- legacy mode did nothing.
it could be a power prob try unpluging all extra drives and just use problem drive to see if u get sam error also have a look in disk management in services to see if u can initailize it .
Disk management doesn't list the problem drive. maybe I will try a different power plug. The system has 3 three sata drives and a sata dvd burner, so I have maxed the power connectors, I am using a Y adapter, but I do not remember if the problem drive is using the Y. I think I will try maybe a different position for power on the problem drive. On the ide ribbon I have tried the master and slave position. When I make a change on the ribbon cable, it works for a day or two, then disappears.
ok, I am looking at the side of the psu, it says +12V2 = 13A 156A max -12V = 0.3A 3.6A max +5VSB = 2.5A 12.5A max Is my problem inadequate power? I may have found my problem, I had three drives daisy chained off the same power connector! I had to do some wire cutting and soldering, but now the power is a little more spread out. The "phantom" HDD is showing up now, I will see if it is up permanently. I will post back in a week if all is well, or sooner if it drops off line...
you have a total of 5 hard drives? how many optical drives & what types as sata or ide? what is the total wattage output of the psu? don't think it is your psu as problem is only with ide drives not sata drives.
I have three sata hard drives, one sata optical drive, and one ide hard drive. The ide hard drive was sharing power with two sata drives. In fact one of the sata drives that was sharing power with the ide drive, also "fell offline" this morning. When I opened the pc to look at the psu ratings I noticed I needed to rearrange the power distribution. The problem was using a mix of 3.5 and 2.5 sata and ide drives, the power connectors are different. The adapters I was using would only let me get everything connected if three drives shared one plug. I fixed that by cutting and soldering the power connectors in a more spread out way. This fixed it I think, I underestimated the power requirements of the hard drives.
