Slow Boot, dual configuration
Hello,
Ever since I installed a 2nd hard drive, my system is booting very slow. I read there was a bug with western digital drives and you should use cable select to prevent it from stalling during the boot process. I have the 2 drives (40GB Western Digital and 120GB Maxtor) installed on the same cable now. My motherboard is an Abit KT7A-RAID. I have them both on cable select now, but the system is still booting slow. I used to have them in Master/Slave configuration, but the same slow boot was occuring.
Is there anything else I could try besides using the 2nd IDE connector? I have my cd-rw in that, i've heard it will slow down the HD if you put it on the same IDE cable as a cd-rom/cd-rw, is that true? I would just use the 2 extra IDE connectors since the mobo supports RAID, but I didn't load the RAID drivers during my Win2000 install, and I've read that is the only time you are able to do it.
Thanks in advance.
Ever since I installed a 2nd hard drive, my system is booting very slow. I read there was a bug with western digital drives and you should use cable select to prevent it from stalling during the boot process. I have the 2 drives (40GB Western Digital and 120GB Maxtor) installed on the same cable now. My motherboard is an Abit KT7A-RAID. I have them both on cable select now, but the system is still booting slow. I used to have them in Master/Slave configuration, but the same slow boot was occuring.
Is there anything else I could try besides using the 2nd IDE connector? I have my cd-rw in that, i've heard it will slow down the HD if you put it on the same IDE cable as a cd-rom/cd-rw, is that true? I would just use the 2 extra IDE connectors since the mobo supports RAID, but I didn't load the RAID drivers during my Win2000 install, and I've read that is the only time you are able to do it.
Thanks in advance.
0
Comments
NS
The loading of the drivers during initial install is just if the drives are on that controler during the setup, so it can actually find them.
I would put each drive on the master of each IDE cable. Some people say it slows it down with other devices but I have never had any speed impacts from doing it, at all.
NS
http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/biosdriver.php?categories=1&model=89
They installed fine and removed the "mass storage controller" from device manager. Putting both hard drives and the cd-rw on their own IDE cables fixed the problem with the slow boot, nice and speedy now.. under 1 min
However, now my CD-RW on the RAID controller doesn't show up in Windows, but it shows up as the master on the RAID controller when the computer is booting.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
One thing I CAN tell you-- if you are booting off of the WD and you have the Maxtor mostly being used for data, there is one WD feature designed in that can be something loved or hated. WDs will slow themselves to UDMA33 if put on a older 40 conductor HD cable or the wrong kind of round cable. I would TRY checking and making sure you are using an 80 conductor cable, even if it means you have to use a flat one to test. Could cut your boot time to 1\3 what it is....
OTOH, someone with an older computer loves this, the WDs work when just plugged into them usually othr than pure size issues. The comuters that balk at over 8 GIG will run a WD and use up to 8 GIG-- the ones that have a 32 GB barrier will use up to 32 GIG. Modern ones will use whole drive. But the drives will get along fine with newer and older controllers.
ME, I just make user the right cable for the mobo is used, and for a mobo that can handle a 120 Gig HD and XP, that is an 80 Conductor cable for the HDs.
Maxtors tend not to be able to step speed purely by cable-- for new machines, this means that they try to run at ATA\100 even on 40 conductor cables. IF you have a 40 conductor cable used with the HD, the WD is running at one third the rate of the Maxtor.
Change the cable if so, then when booted run the disk defragmantation tool on the WD drive. That will let the SMART parts in the WD help figure out how to tune for high speed use and cause it to do so as it rewrites data and defrags.
For future reference, might be easier not to mix both brands in one box, or make sure the cable is an 80 conductor cable.
If the CD-RW has a cable to it that seems to have twice as many wires in it than the HD cable, switch the cables please. An 80 codnuctor cable will seem to (and does) have many small wires covered with plastic in it, and it should have visibly thinner wires than the CD-RW cable does.
John Danielson.
Does the drive show up in Windows Devices?
Are you using EZ Cdcreator?
Nope, i'm not using EZ CD-Creator; I use Nero.
John Danielson.
Ok, I just tried having the IDE cable unplugged from the CD-RW (still plugged into the mobo)
Neither helped, it still isn't showing up anywhere in Windows. I have the /sos switch in my boot.ini file for Windows 2000. This shows everything thats happening during Window's startup, I can see my hard drives being mounted and assigned drive letters... I don't remember if my CD-RW was in that list, but it isn't now.
Also, you meant CD-RW instead of DVD right?
I know my MSI burner will not get along with one brand of CD-ROM drive, and will not co-exist with my TDK burner on same computer. The TDK does not like the CD-ROM drive either, but the CD-ROM drive works fine on a cable by itself (and changing every valid combo of jumpers for a channel and changing postions on cable and settign jumpers right for postions would not let the two work together). Most removable media drives have imperfect designs as far as working with all other things.
So, while some say in essence get rid of the thing, I say lets prove it works or does not. If not, you have grounds to tell the people you got it from to refund it or RMA and exchange for a Plextor or TDK with 10-20 bucks more (probably a 40X, but most (95%+) of current boxes will not use a burner real reliably above 40X anyways) sent along. TDKs are being rebated heavily.
I WILL ask one more seemingly wild and dumb thing-- you did Windows update your Win2K to Service Pack 4, right????
John Danielson.
-SCSI and RAID Controllers
-HTP 370 UDMA/ATA100 RAID Controller
Also under System Devices
-Highpoint RCM Device.
I have XP on my board and I'm just using the native XP drivers.
On another note, you should probably have your HD on the HPT on that board to take advantage of the ATA/100. The IDE's are ATA/66
Yeah, it looks like this in device manager:
- SCSI and RAID controllers
HighPoint HPT3xx ATA RAID Controller
HighPoint RCM Device
though the RCM Device is under the header above and not system devices.
@Ageek: I don't have a dvd drive in my computer
Tell ya what. Why don't you put the CD-RW on one of the IDE's and put a HD on the RAID and see what happens. The CD-RW don't need the ATA/100 anyway and the HD probably could use it.
If you don't see the HD on the RAID, you might have to get an earlier version of the driver to match your HTP BIOS or upgrade the HTP BIOS. You can get that stuff from http://www.biosmods.com/
Thanks again Cool Canuck, Ageek, and NightShade737.
That burner is an MMC3, it wants to run at UDMA\ATA 33-- so should run on an ATA\66 capable IDE bus fine. The only other thing I can say before you trash it or get the person who sold it to you to take it back is to try it in another computer, on an IDE cable with no other drive on it. If it is not found there (on either of two computers) at all then it is dead.
Do the lights on the burner come on, any of them, when the computer boots??? If not, have you checked the power cable connection???
John Danielson.
It's sort of an unknown brand, Norcent. But hey, I'm not complaining... i got it during a rebate sale at Best Buy, 48x12x48x CD-RW came out to be $10.00 after the rebate, woohoo!
Added:
Uhh oh, Now about 20-30 sec. after I try to save a file to my F:\ (drive that is hooked up to the RAID controller) I receive this error:
I'm fairly confident I am using an 80-wire/40-pin IDE cable since both of my hard drives came with those, and I also tried switching the IDE cables between drives.
I also tried going into the RAID setup and setting the drives mode to UDMA 4 / ATA66 which didn't solve anything (before it was set to UDMA 5 / ATA100). "Write caching" is not enabled (its even grayed out)... are there any options I should look for in the BIOS that could be doing it? Thanks.
Looking into the Delayed write failure.
NS
I have never had that write error with mine. As I posted earlier, either back down the version of the driver or up grade the HTP BIOS. The drivers should not be newer than the BIOS.
It's pretty odd they offer you that HPT372 RAID driver on the same page, but then the latest bios contains a version much lower.
I connected to the ABIT FTP and found the HPT driver version 1.11.0512, my HPT BIOS version is 1.11.0402... not exactly the same but i'll give it a try since flashing the BIOS to the latest version didn't work (and didn't include the HPT 2.34 BIOS like they said)!
Added:
Nope, i'm now using the 1.11.0512 HPT Win2000 drivers and same problem.
Hmm, I also read on http://www.highpoint-tech.com/370drivers.htm this:
If you do not tell the RAID bios what drive it has, or run the RAID BIOS subportion of the main BIOS, which is true of my very much different but still Soyo mob with HPT, you might have the error just cuz the RAID BIOS is not autoconfiguring the drive right.
From what the OP has said,it might or might not help to mention this-- if you stick the HPT in array mode, it expects at least two HDs attached to it.
If it keeps its def only for one boot, and if shut down and leaving off for over 5 min loses def and thus access to drive, then it is probably time for a CMOS battery. Mine uses a CR or DL 2032 Battery-- the DL (DiLithium) is replacing the CR cells these days.
John Danielson.
Those WD drives will drive you nuts if you don't get that jumper correct. If it is the only drive on the channel, set it to Single Drive. Cable select doesn't always work. Especially if it is plugged into the wrong connector and is the only drive.
JUST minute. Drive "F:" Where did Drive F: come from??? C: D: E: G: no F:!!!
A:\ - 3 & 1/2" floppy
C:\ - Main hard drive with OS, 40GB WD - On IDE 1
D:\ - CD-RW, on IDE 2
E:\ - NTFS partition (20GB) - On HPT RAID Controller (IDE 3)
F:\ - FAT32 partition (9.99GB) - On HPT RAID Controller (IDE 3)
E:\ and F:\ are the same drive, the 120GB Maxtor drive... sorry I neglected to mention this before, it slipped my mind. I have a total of 5 partitions and ~38GB i didn't allocate for any partition yet on that 120GB.
Hmm... I just tried moving a file to my E:\ which is on the same drive... guess what, no error! So now the only difference between the E:\ and F:\ are different sizes and partition formats... FAT32 = Problem, NTFS = No problem...
I have the FAT32 partition so in Linux (the rare times when I select it on boot) i can use it to play my mp3's and also use it to play them in Windows also. I can also move data to there in windows, and read it in linux.
BE honest with you, I would try running ScanDisk on F and see if it can do anything with the partition-- I think the part table is partly dead for that part at this point, or he has media problems on that drive, or he has the RAID controller in RAID mode, or he has virus or worm in his system that attacked the HD part table .
Second and third can be switched as to probability, last is least likely unless OLD virus that cannot attack NTFS of Win2K's sort. but most likely, Win2K just does not like the part table-- and least damaging route to find out is to try to fix with Scandisk absent a floppy boot of PM8 and a part "bad block" check.
At least the problem is resolving some, and was not just one issue involved -- which lets the OP (Original Poster) fix it piece by piece and the fixes can be broken into portions.
John Danielson.
The problem didn't occur when I used to have the same drive plugged into IDE 1 or 2, just the RAID ones. I've searched on google groups and web and it seems to be a fairly common issue... most people seem to resolve the issue by converting the drive partition to NTFS, which isn't an option for me since i purposely made it FAT32 so I could read and write to it in linux.
I'll run scandisk and defrag the partition to see if that resolves it. Also Microsoft's site recommends this:
After I flashed the BIOS this morning and reset the CMOS I first used load fail-safe settings to get rid of a checksum error, then I used load optimized defaults since they are well... optimized
At least it's narrowed down to the partition type and not just the drive itself... since like I said before it's not happening on my NTFS partition that is on the same drive. Also, others have found converting it to NTFS resolves it.
Drive 0 - (-) Linux - IDE
Drive 1 - (C) XP - HPT (use to be NTFS now FAT32)
Drive 2 - (G) Storage - HPT (FAT32 so I could read or write with both O/Ss)
CD-ROM 0 (D)
CD-ROM 1 (E)
I have had problems with NTFS and no longer trust or use it.
The thing I noticed here is, XP recognizes Drive 0 and all it's partions but because it a Linux file system the file system is listed as unknown and NO Drive Letter is assigned. However, Drive (F) seems to be reserved and not used. Thinking there is something there with your system. Like, somehow it is trying to write to the Linux partition. Duno?
I have used NTFS and FAT32 on and off the HPT without problems in that regard.
NS