IDE Letter & jumper configuration

Gleisweiler

My IDE connection on my PC with an ASUS motherboard has failed and I need to ascertain the allocated letter to the 2 HD's that were connected. The jumpers are in place but I can't find them when I put them in an enclosure connected via the USB ports. I tried the same procedure in a laptop, but without the allocated letters and jumper configuration I'm at a loss. swapping the jumpers etc has had no effect. How can I get the letter allocated and the jumper config? Any help would be appreciated.

hearny

I dont know exactly what you are trying to achieve here to be honest. The Jumper settings on the drive do not have anything to do with the drive letters.

Are you trying to retrieve data from them or get the computer running again.

If its to get the computer running look for a pci ide controller card, or a direct replacement for the ASUS board (ASUS board would be a lot easier).

If its for Data Recovery Try the drives one at a time with the drive jumper settings as Master (or without any jumper settings in if that doesn't work).

Does the drive show up under Disk Management on Windows.

What is the model number of the ASUS board.

Capt'n Midnight

it must be a very old drive because most PC's shipped in the last 10 years would have been set to cable select

if the drive is going in a USB enclosure you should not need to change jumpers
if you want to then set as master / single drive / master without slave - it varies

Check in device manager that the USB controller is recognised and the drives are recognised, then check in disk manager to see the partition(s) on the drive


windows usually boots from C: then depends on what it sees first between primary partitions on the seond drive and extended partitions on the first one - and just for the laugh it may assign a letter to a drive to make it difficult to use in another machine later on

Gleisweiler

Thanks for the replies, much appreciated. If I can answer both replies with a history of the problem, perhaps it will become a little clearer. I’m a hobbyist and had the system designed and built specifically for video editing at a cost of almost £3,000 in 2007 by a specialist company when I lived in the UK. Prior to my move here, I upgraded (better and faster video cards, m’board etc) at a further cost of almost £900. The m’board is an ASUS P5WDH DeLuxe Core2Duo running on XP Pro. (To date Win7 does not have all the drivers required for my capture cards and programmes)
I’m au fait with main frames and PC’s as I’ve been involved with them since1969 (yes I’m that oldJ) with an international company in the UK.
Recently the 2 drives on the IDE cable were not being recognised and system restore would not allow restoration further back than January 2011 although restore points were showing for over a year earlier. In Device Manager the IDE, USB and all parts of the system are showing as working properly. I’ve also tried to access the drives in DOS but again no luck, they just don’t show. All my backup and recovery disks etc were in a box that was lost during the move here, something I noticed only when the problem occurred recently. I replaced the 80 core IDE cable, twice just in case one was faulty, but to no avail and then I tried the disk enclosures, again without success. One of the drives was in the original system and it is this that contains some irreplaceable footage. In desperation I tried all manner of things, software retrieval programmes et al, even to reinstalling the m’board software, XP, and all video cards etc. in the hope of finding the disks but no joy. In desperation I thought that if I could ID the disks and find the jumper config I might be able to advance, but alas without success.
It is possible that both drives have failed at exactly the same time, but this seems unlikely...or is it? If the drives are dead then that is that and I’ll change over to SATA drives but I feel that to just abandon the system and give up would be a shame as all parts appear to be working as they should, except of course for the failure to find the drives. As I approach the winter of my life (70) I feel less inclined to spend £000’s on a new system, but perhaps that will have to be the way forward if I want to continue with my hobby. Once again, thanks for the help.
FRANK

hearny

Im assuming that the system is booting from another hard drive.

Are the drives recognised in the bios?

Are they disabled in bios?

Are the drives both powered by the same power cable split?
if they are can you try using different available power connection.

Have you tried a Linux LiveCD.

If its not booting try to get your hands on a SATA drive and set up XP on it.

System restore as you probably know will not restore files.

Gleisweiler

After several weeks of unistalling/reinstalling etc. I managed to get my system up and running. The problem was with the EIDE connection which seemed to fail completely, taking down both HD's with it. How this happened I'll never know but it did. The HD's won't show up when connected to other systems, either as internal or through enclosures, so it seems that the irrplaceable footage I wanted to keep has been lost forever.

Reinstalling the m'board and changing to 3 X 500Gb SATA drives gave me a way forward but the settings for the video capture card and the various video editing progs proved to be more difficult and it was this that took the time.

Windows was uninstalled /reinstalled, without exaggeration, over a dozen times but on each occasion it threw up more and different problems when I booted up. At last I got it all working except for a new (to me) panel that appears telling me that the MOM.EXC failed to install a file. However this doesn't seem to affect anything so I can use the system as before.
What a nightmare it was.

Many thanks once againg to you guys.

bonzodog2

Gleisweiler wrote: »

The problem was with the EIDE connection which seemed to fail completely, taking down both HD's with it. How this happened I'll never know but it did. The HD's won't show up when connected to other systems, either as internal or through enclosures, so it seems that the irrplaceable footage I wanted to keep has been lost forever.

Maybe the problem on the mobo has damaged the circuitry on the PCB on the disks. You might consider sourcing a replacement PCB, make sure to try and get as identical as possible, down to the same month of production, as sometimes the same model of drive can be made in different factories with different (and non-compatible) firmware. The firmware (stored on the disk) needs to match the controller chip on the PCB.

Might be worth a shot for your footage, good luck !