cache not working? another problem?

[dustybyrd]

i have one of the maxtor 80Gb 8mb cache drives...and it is working...but...

it boots very slowly 2-3 minutes instead of about 1 minute or less before...

it won't run sisoft sandra hard drive benchmark...although sisoft sees the hard drive

it WON'T run "powermax"...which is Maxtor's hard drive diagnostic program...after i start the program by pressing F8 it just boots out of the program....

however if i run the same powermax program (on the same CD) on my other system that has a hard drive just like this one...it works fine...

when i run "bootvis" to speed up booting...the trace says that the "write cache" is not enabled...


ANY IDEAS PLEASE?

[dustybyrd]

I solved the problem. It turns out the primary IDE port can't do UDMA5 with the Hard Drive, but strangely enough, it can do UDMA2 for the CDRW (PIO on the zip drive slave).

When I put the hard drive on the Secondary IDE port, it can run at UDMA5 and is now at 42mb/sec average with HD Tach.

I switched them back just to make sure, and again same problem...hard drive on primary IDE can only do PIO, while the CDwriter on the Secondary IDE can do UDMA2.

So now, my hard drive is on the secondary IDE channel and back to 35 second boot times and 42mb/sec. And, luckilly, the cd writer can run at UDMA2 on the secondary IDE channel.

Strange, heh? I guess the port has gone "a little" bad...in that it can't do UDMA5 anymore...at least with this hard drive. :/

I did try manually setting the UDMA/PIO levels in the bios...with the Hard drive in the primary IDE...but it didn't matter because windows forced the hard drive to run in PIO.