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IDE Tape drive detection

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9 replies

by getclyde

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I have a customer with an Intel 815EEA motherboard, 2 hardrives mirrored using a Promise Ultra66 PCI controller. The OS is Win2000 Pro. A Seagate Hornet 20GB IDE tape drive has been attached to any of the motherboard IDE ports with no success of bootup detection. The drive, however, will detect every time using Add New Hardware and works perfectly until the next restart or shutdown. Any fix or workaround the manual detect is required. Nothing else has a problem.

9 replies

by dmiles

Try turning the drive on before booting the computer,and see if it is detected
Check the CMOS control panel to see if the drive is showing in the configuration list
Make sure that you have the controller srivers installed properly,check the DeviceManage for any conflicts.

by shanghai sam

I tried all this before, remember that the drive works after using Add New Hardware - and works well I might add. The problem lies in the PnP portion of the OS at startup

by thechas

Check that you have the correct hard drives set to auto detect in the bios settings.

Verify that the drive is jumpered properly (master, slave, none) per Seagates recommendations.

If this is a genuine Intel board, check your bios revision, and check Intels site for a bios update. Check the revision list, and see if tape drive detection shows up on a revision. If you decide to update the bios, follow all instructions from Intel to reduce the risk of killing the mother board.

Also, check for updated drivers for the IDE controller and review that revision list.

by shanghai sam

I tried every variation of hardware setting, including an hours worth with Seagate. They sent a new drive, same results.

by estebandelatorre

The ide interfaces many times fail to detect devices such as cd roms when they are configured as "MASTER" and no HD is present.
Try this.
Place an old HD (jumpered as MASTER) into the IDE PRIMARY mother interface. Boot the system and see if the drive is correctly detected.
Set the tape AS SLAVE and place it in the same cables as the drive previously installed.
See if it it detected while booting.
hope it helps!!!

by getclyde

The impact of changing controllers in this "server" to the doctors office would be catastrophic. I could also change tape drive, PC or operating system which probably would equally well work.

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