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  • #2080707

    Finding out which IDE chain my drives ar

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    by alainiala ·

    Our desktops are finally transitioning from NT 4 sp3 to sp6a. I would like for our machines to be able to take advantage of the UDMA support that was introduced in SP5, but I don’t know if our machines are configured so that our HDD is alone on theprimary IDE chain, or if it shares it with the CDROM. Is there a way to find this information without having to open the case? Thanks

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    • #3891949

      Finding out which IDE chain my drives ar

      by tomcat-2000 ·

      In reply to Finding out which IDE chain my drives ar

      Well … in the BIOS setup you should be able to see what types of hard drives are installed / autodetected. For example, in the IBM BIOS Setup, under IDE drives you can see what drives are where (primary/slave and IDE 0 / IDE 1). The CDROM will show up as well. Hope this helps.

    • #3893337

      Finding out which IDE chain my drives ar

      by lil_turk ·

      In reply to Finding out which IDE chain my drives ar

      You could look in the boot.ini file on the root drive of the machines and it will tell you how many harddrives and which ide bank it’s on.

    • #3893287

      Finding out which IDE chain my drives ar

      by lo ·

      In reply to Finding out which IDE chain my drives ar

      Boot – Maybe with F8. You should see what drive is connected to what when the BIOS does it’s autodecttion (assuming you have auto rather tha assigned). It goes by pretty fast on my sytem. If you F8 (is that the right one to single step?) you should be able to get it to pause long enough to write it doww. Might be able to put the proces into a memo, ask the user’s to do the check and send a mail if it doesn’t have the desired config. lo

      • #3893185

        Finding out which IDE chain my drives ar

        by alainiala ·

        In reply to Finding out which IDE chain my drives ar

        I neglected to mention that the machines targetted are IBM PC300PL’s… I took a look in the BIOS of these machines, and unfortunately they are very “dumbed-down”… can’t really determine whether or not the drives are chained together or not. The Boot.ini looks like it gives you disk # and partition #, but not sure if it really tells you if they are on the same IDE channel. I suppose if I crack one of them open to see how its arranged inside, they SHOULD be all the same… but I’d hate for one of our user’s machines to bomb if it turns out that they aren’t all the same… *sigh*.

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