Serious problems using two HDs

[MrKillington]

Alright, here's a stumper for everyone: I use two hard drives, a small one (10 GB) that's a few years old, and a newer one (used to be a maxtor 60GB, now it's a WD 80 GB w/ 8MB cache). Anyway, a little while ago the maxtor started acting funny. At the time, my old one was the master and the new one the slave (obvious problem, read on); both are on the same IDE. Basically, whenever I tried to use it at all, my entire computer would bog down. My mouse was jerky, programs acted as though I had no RAM. Since it had been working with this configuration for months, thought it might be a virus of some sort or hardware failure, not an OS thing. I did virus scanning, ended up reformatting the drive, nothing. I tried the maxtor in a friend's comp, it worked fine. I plugged a friend's HD into my system, that worked fine. So I thought it might be some weird thing with the maxtor, so I went out and got a WD drive. When I installed it, I made it the master and my old one the slave, thinking there might be a problem with the controller card. The first one failed in 30 minutes, made a weird clicking noise. I returned it, got another one. This one worked perfectly for a week, but now it's doing the same thing the maxtor was: my entire system bogs down when I use it, and it seems to get progressively worse. note that I have not once reinstalled my OS, I have been trying to avoid doing so. Bottom line: is it heating? has anyone had this problem? Should I just suck it up and rebuild my computer? Thanks!

Also, could it be a problem with bandwidth sharing over the same IDE?

Ok, I just figured out that the dang thing is being reset to PIO mode instead of UDMA or DMA... why this is happening I don't know, it seems to happen after the HD has been in my computer for a while though... Also, I'm on Win2K if that helps.

 

[nebben]

I started having a similar problem with a Maxtor 27gb drive and a newer WD 80gb drive. I could get the WD up as master on channel1, then the maxtor on channel 2 as master. It worked for at least a week or two, then I started getting major problems in windows (98). I couldn't figure it out, so I tried taking the Maxtor out of the loop. Then, noises...clicking, spinning up, spinning down... then it wouldn't even recognize the drive on bootup. I tried WD's utilities (manually setting the ATA speed of the drive), all to no avail. I was sure the drive was bad. I eventually narrowed it down to a fluke in the cable *and* limited support in the BIOS. I still don't know why it even booted up for a week.

I got an ATA66 controller, and never had a problem again.

I was thinking that it could be a problem with your motherboard, and with the way that the OS is configured on the disk. Did you ever try doing a repair? Latest BIOS updates? Latest drivers?

-ben

 

[MrKillington]

well, no, I haven't picked up new drivers, mainly because it was working for so long. But I will do that, as soon as it is no longer 10 pm.