ATA100 hdd on ata66 controller

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Guest

Guest
My system has been locking up lately so I decided to reformat and start over. My drive will not format. It starts but at 6% format it stops saying not ready. I am currently using an old 500meg drive and haven't had a problem (except all I can load is win98!) so I assume it is hard drive failure. I have two questions:

1. Any other suggestions on the hard drive problem?
2. Assuming hard drive failure I have a soyo SY6BA-IV motherboard with ata66, can I use an ata100 drive on this board and will there be any degradation of the drives performance?
 

RavenPrime

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Run Fdisk, clear your old partition and creat a new.
Run scandisk of the boot disk using thorough.
Check your internal connections--vibrations and movement over time can loosen them.
If this does not work, your HD is probably failing.
An ATA/100 HD will exceed what the ATA/66 controller can do and so will not run as fast as it could with an ATA/100 controller. Your system may still do better with an ATA/100 drive since they are newer and have higher rotational speeds and lower access times.
Since ATA/100 drives are only a $3-4US more, it may be worth it.
www.buy.com is having a special with no shipping through the weekend.

James
 
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Guest

Guest
You shouldn't experience any performance loss, even if you use an ata100 drive with an ata66 controller. The reason being that current hard drives are not fast enough to get any real performance benefit from ata100, compared to ata66. Of course, in a little while, there will be faster drives that will be able to benefit from ata100.
 
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Guest

Guest
Thanks for the help. It was apparently a loose wire as now the HDD works fine. However I am still gettting random lockups. I have narrowed it to either directX 8 or IE 5.5 service pack 1. The Computer works fine without these. Anyone else have this problem? I use windows 2000 SP1.
 

RavenPrime

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IE5.5 is very buggy. I have been having lots of problems with it. I had to downgrade by video driver because of it.
DX8 has been working great for me. No problems at all. In fact it has fixed several problems I was having before.
I have read lots of other people having problems with it though--go figure.

James