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Secondary Master Disk Fail

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11 replies

by etoile

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I am just building a new system on an Asus P4B mobo and have the following devices set up:
IDE1: 40 gig Seagate HDD(master)
20 gig WD HDD(slave)
IDE2 RICOH MP7163A CDR/RW(master)
Pioneer DVDRom (slave)

Occasionally (a little TOO often)as the system boots up the BIOS detects all 4 devices avove, pauses, then reports that the Secondary Master Disk has failed, giving me the option to continue without it, or enter the bios setup. If I continue, windows loads as usual, and the device is present in explorer. If I enter the BIOS, save and exit, on the reboot the problem has gone.
It may do the same the very next power up, or it might not ...

Very annoying.

For info: the ribbon cable for IDE2 is a LONG one because I need to have the drives sitting at the top of a Full tower case.

Thanks in advance.

11 replies

by travis.ryan

I too have had this, try altering the setting under BIOS Power Management and switch off Windows Power managent.
Try this & it will give you a direction to head in to sorting the prob.
It worked for me.

by jrjacques

check the jumper settings on the secondary drives that one is not set to cable select. otherwise reverse the secondary drives. as the controlers are built into the drives there can be timing problems between different makes/types of drives.

by etoile

One is set to master and the other to slave. I have already swapped the two and the same problem persists.
Thanks for the response.

by dmiles

One check the BIOS configuration is set to AUTO
You may be getting the problem because the bios is trying to detect the secondary master as a boot drive
Consider resetting the drive configuration setup
1)Primary controller
Harddrive as master DVD as slave
2)Secondary controller
CD-RW as master
second drive as slave
Check the jumper settings on the drives to make sure that are set to master and slave

by etoile

1. If this was the case, wouldn't the problem occur on ever boot?
2. Could you please explain the rationale behind changing the drive config as you suggest - doesn't performance decline to that of the slowest device on a controller ie. will I lose the ATA100 performance by sharing the cable with a slower standard CD drive?
3. I have tried each as both - problem persists.

by lo

Sounds a bit like a problem I had some time back. Can one assume that if it boots at all without error then cabel and other settings are correct? If yes, and it does, even if only now an then the problem may be the one I had.

I hadn't pushed the cable all the way in or in the process of screwing around with other cables and such, it had pulled partially out from the MB or drive. Checking that all cables were fully seated on both MB and drives cleared it up.

by etoile

I had thought about that, but I have been swapping cables, jumpers, but still getting the "occasional" disk fail message on boot ...

by harold.smit

It could be that the problem lies in the powersupply, for this cofiguration you need at least a 300w powersupply, less could lead in powerfaillures for some pheriptitals, Harddrives require a lot of power on bootup.

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