Interesting twist. Has anyone encountered the following:
A 400GB hard drive appears to work fine on the second IDE channel (as a master) of my PCI drive controller card. The controller card supports 4 IDE devices, one master and one slave on each of two IDE channels. IDE1 master is my boot drive C:\. IDE2 master is my 400GB drive M:\. Everything works fine in this configuration. But when I remove the M:\ drive from the PC and place it in a external IDE drive enclosure that uses a firewire link to the PC, strange things happen. Accessing the drive becomes flakey - sometimes the drive is visible in windows (or disk manager), sometimes it is not. Copying or moving files takes forever or may not complete. At this point, I believe there is nothing wrong with the firewire link or the external IDE drive enclosure since they seem to work fine if I put a different hard drive into the enclosure. So my question is: is it possible that this 500GB M:\ drive is somehow configured to work as an internal drive but not as an external drive in an enclosure. Seems like a silly question to me, since both scenarios are basically an IDE hard drive connected to an IDE controller - but who knows!?
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LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited December 2008
It may not be a problem with the drive, but with the enclosure. Throughout the years I have had upgrade external enclosures as hard drives have grown in capacity. I have one older enclosure (six or seven years old) that works perfectly with any PATA drive smaller than 160GB. With larger drives, they either are not recognized by the computer or don't operate properly.
How old is your enclosure? Was it part of drive-enclosure kit or is it a standalone enclosure?
The drive enclosure is from 2004/05. Let me add that this enclosure seems to work fine with a 500GB drive that I have. But there seems to be something about this 400GB drive that is flakey when attached to this enclosure - even thought the same 400GB drive works fine when connected to the IDE controller PCI card inside the PC. Thoughts?
Possible thoughts:
1 - something physically wrong with the disk. it passes diskchk. tried to run DFT on it, but DFT gives an error (something like "non hitachi drive - 0x71") for just about any drive I try to test. maybe there are some other disk checking tools?
2 - something corrupted on the drive file tables?
3 - insufficient power on the firewire link?
4 - some other incompatibility?
5 - ???
Btw - on a side note - is there some sort of utility that can check to see if drive controller supports 48-bit LBA?
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LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited December 2008
That's what I was trying to get across: older enclosures may or may not work with higher capacity drives. I have an old enclosure that works well with some drives but will not work with other drives of the same or lower capacity but of a different brand. If your drive makes it through Checkdisk then it's probably in good working order.
You could always download your drive's diagnostic tools from the manufacturer's site. It's freeware. Give it a try.
Concerning your PCI drive controller: some of them are just plain flakey! You might want to uninstall it and then reinstall it with the latest drivers. Do you set the attached hard drive to cable select when?
That's what I was trying to get across: older enclosures may or may not work with higher capacity drives. I have an old enclosure that works well with some drives but will not work with other drives of the same or lower capacity but of a different brand. If your drive makes it through Checkdisk then it's probably in good working order.
You could always download your drive's diagnostic tools from the manufacturer's site. It's freeware. Give it a try.
Concerning your PCI drive controller: some of them are just plain flakey! You might want to uninstall it and then reinstall it with the latest drivers. Do you set the attached hard drive to cable select when?
The drives are always set to master. Is cable select better?
Comments
A 400GB hard drive appears to work fine on the second IDE channel (as a master) of my PCI drive controller card. The controller card supports 4 IDE devices, one master and one slave on each of two IDE channels. IDE1 master is my boot drive C:\. IDE2 master is my 400GB drive M:\. Everything works fine in this configuration. But when I remove the M:\ drive from the PC and place it in a external IDE drive enclosure that uses a firewire link to the PC, strange things happen. Accessing the drive becomes flakey - sometimes the drive is visible in windows (or disk manager), sometimes it is not. Copying or moving files takes forever or may not complete. At this point, I believe there is nothing wrong with the firewire link or the external IDE drive enclosure since they seem to work fine if I put a different hard drive into the enclosure. So my question is: is it possible that this 500GB M:\ drive is somehow configured to work as an internal drive but not as an external drive in an enclosure. Seems like a silly question to me, since both scenarios are basically an IDE hard drive connected to an IDE controller - but who knows!?
How old is your enclosure? Was it part of drive-enclosure kit or is it a standalone enclosure?
Possible thoughts:
1 - something physically wrong with the disk. it passes diskchk. tried to run DFT on it, but DFT gives an error (something like "non hitachi drive - 0x71") for just about any drive I try to test. maybe there are some other disk checking tools?
2 - something corrupted on the drive file tables?
3 - insufficient power on the firewire link?
4 - some other incompatibility?
5 - ???
Btw - on a side note - is there some sort of utility that can check to see if drive controller supports 48-bit LBA?
You could always download your drive's diagnostic tools from the manufacturer's site. It's freeware. Give it a try.
Concerning your PCI drive controller: some of them are just plain flakey! You might want to uninstall it and then reinstall it with the latest drivers. Do you set the attached hard drive to cable select when?
The drives are always set to master. Is cable select better?