Broken computer
Jun. 30th, 2008 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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naath has acquired a computer from a friend. She'd like to
put her existing PATA IDE disks into it, but it can't see them.
The previous owner never used a PATA device, so there's no past evidence that it has ever worked.
The motherboard is an ABit NF-M2S. It has two SATA ports and a single PATA port. The BIOS appears to think the SATA are channels 2 and 3 (i.e. these ones disappear if you turn off SATA) and the PATA channel 0; it knows that there's supposed to be a master and a slave, but it never believes there is anything connected to it.
We've tried three disks and a CD ROM, and at least three IDE cables, including the ones that were working fine in her old computer (where they still work when she put them back). The disks make noises at power on and the CD ROM's tray can be opened, so we're pretty sure they are getting power.
We've looked through the BIOS several times for 'enable IDE' options. As far as we can see all possibly relevant things are enabled.
We reset the BIOS's nonvolatile memory fairly early in the process, with no useful effect.
The IDE cable is plugged in the right way round both according to the manual and the physical keying.
Naath's two drivers were configured as master and slave and remain so. We tried them both ways around on the cable, and also attaching only one of them at a time. The other drive I tried on its own configured as master and then using cable select.
The system can see SATA and USB devices fine, and boot off both. I booted an Ubuntu Dapper installer off a CF card and it could tell there was an IDE controller but didn't spot any devices attached t it.
Does anyone have any further suggestions of things we could try before concluding that this motherboard's IDE is bust? Current best suggestion for a workaround seems to be a PCI or PCIe IDE adaptor and use that.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-30 11:45 am (UTC)