Frozen On "Detecting IDE Drives"...?

[Skoi]

Greetings,

So I'm curious...my computer has started running slower the past couple of weeks. I have Windows XP Professional, and am running a less than a year old 250GB hard drive, and a 2 1/2 - 3 year old 80GB hard drive.

As it has been slowing down (as I have been filling the 250GB hard drive up, which is the main drive), it has been getting slower at detecting the IDE drives when the computer boots up.

This morning it would just freeze there. I couldn't wait around long enough to see if it would go at some point because I was on my way to work, but I did wait a good couple of minutes.

Any suggestions as to what's going on, or what I can do? The only thing that has really been making any weird noises is the OLD, OLD 3 1/2x5 floppy disk drive. Would that cause this problem?

Thanks to anyone that can help!

spiral out
skoi

 

[iss]

A bad floppy drive can cause all kinds of boot problems and or system instability problems. to check if it is the problem then simply unplug the power cable to the Floppy and remove the floppy cable.

 

[patio]

How old is this machine ? ?
Have you recently added any new hardware devices ? ?

This is a function of the BIOS not the OS so it has nothing to do with the OS.

Let us know.

patio.

 

[Skoi]

So here's what I did:

I unplugged the floppy disk drive. Still did not work. I then unplugged the primary drive (aka the 250GB) and then the slave drive (aka the 80GB) did in fact register.

I took the floppy drive completey out, as I don't even remember the last time I used the forbidden thing. I then switched around the hard drive cables so that the one that was connected to the floppy disk was now connected to one of the hard drives.

After I did that, everything started working.

Is it common for these cables (the wide, thin, and flat) ones to stop working or go out?

Any other suggestions as to what might have caused the problem?

The machine is less than a year old (mainly put together myself), and I have not recently added any new hardware.

Thank for the help everyone!

spiral out
skoi

 

[iss]

First off, if you were able to take the cable from the floppy drive and attach it to your hard drive then you had the WRONG cable attached to your floppy drive to begin with. secondly, if that is a 40 pin cable it will only run at ATA33 which will seriously degrade the performance of your ATA 100]133 hard drive. you need an 80 pin cable to connect the hard drive for optimom performance.

 

[Skoi]

First off, if you were able to take the cable from the floppy drive and attach it to your hard drive then you had the WRONG cable attached to your floppy drive to begin with. secondly, if that is a 40 pin cable it will only run at ATA33 which will seriously degrade the performance of your ATA 100]133 hard drive. you need an 80 pin cable to connect the hard drive for optimom performance.

Whoops! Sorry, I was wrong in my wording.

I took the primary drive's cable and switched it with the slave drive's.

 

[iss]

I took the primary drive's cable and switched it with the slave drive's.

the primary cable may be defective then, is it an 80 pin cable or a 40 pin cable?

 

[Centurio]

the primary cable may be defective then, is it an 80 pin cable or a 40 pin cable?

You should be more specific. Want to bet that what you call an 80 pin cable has only 40 pins (per connector, of course)?

Rather, it's the number of conductors you should be concerned about.

Skoi: I believe it might be a good idea to replace your IDE cable with a new one, 80 conductors, 40 pins. IMHO, this is the quickest, and cheapest, way to eliminate a cable-related problem.

Regards, Martin A

 

[iss]

when you go to replace it just look for a ATA 100\133 IDE cable.