[SOLVED] IDE Disk blinks red on boot ?

[alanvatrox]

I have this old IDE disk from 1997 which still works.
When I plug it into a more recent motherboard (ASUS P5Q3 from 2008-9) it does the "Detecting Drives...." and it shows up there but the name flashes red a couple of times, with the size and all that and then the boot proceeds as normal.
What does this red flashing mean? I plug an IDE CD Drive and it shows as green, no flashing.

 

[TerryLaze]

Did you look in the manual to see if they say what it means?
Did you put the drive's pins in master or cable select?
If you go into the bios does it show up normally? Can you select it there as a boot drive?
Not that it will boot your system since it has different hardware but just as a test.

 

[USAFRet]

I have this old IDE disk from 1997 which still works.

That is debatable.

How are you connecting this?

 

[alanvatrox]

Did you look in the manual to see if they say what it means?
Did you put the drive's pins in master or cable select?
If you go into the bios does it show up normally? Can you select it there as a boot drive?
Not that it will boot your system since it has different hardware but just as a test.

I did look at the manual and there is no mention of any of what I said.
My disk never had jumper pins, the only thing it has is a small, male, horizontal 4-pin connector, similar to the Floppy Drive's 4-pin power cable.
(On the old PC) It is not detected by the BIOS now, but I tested the day before and it detected it just fine, I think it has to do with the tapes, I plugged the CD drive in and then today it stopped detecting the disk.
(On the P5Q3 PC) I don't think there's a way to see IDE drives on this motherboard, the only thing that shows any IDE disk/drive, is that phase before loading the OS where it looks for legacy devices, so I suppose it kinda detects it since it shows the name and the total disk size in MB but no, I cannot select it as a boot drive from there.

That is debatable.

How are you connecting this?

With a HDD tape and 4-pin power cable. (Not sure if this is what you wanted to know)

 

[USAFRet]

With a HDD tape and 4-pin power cable.

More specifics please.

Are you hoping to boot from whatever OS might have lived on this 25 year old drive?

 

[alanvatrox]

More specifics please.

Are you hoping to boot from whatever OS might have lived on this 25 year old drive?

No, it doesn't boot because it's missing the MBR, I just wanted to open the contents and make another backup and possibly re-install Windows 98 in it.

 

[TerryLaze]

I did look at the manual and there is no mention of any of what I said.
My disk never had jumper pins, the only thing it has is a small, male, horizontal 4-pin connector, similar to the Floppy Drive's 4-pin power cable.

Those are usually at least 6 pins, but with the amount of ide drives out there it could very well be only 4.
Also working with another drive but not on its own is another sign towards the pins being wrongly configured.

How to configure a WD EIDE hard drive using the Alternate Jumper Settings? | DataRecoveryUnion.com

The most common scenario when a drive should be configured with the Alternate Jumper Settings is when the system hangs up or freezes upon boot up after auto-detecting all IDE devices.

www.datarecoveryunion.com

 

[alanvatrox]

Those are usually at least 6 pins, but with the amount of ide drives out there it could very well be only 4.

I was actually wrong. It's a 3 pin connector. My disk, as I said, has no jumper pins.
I can't attach an image using the tools provided, but I'll leave the link of it from Imgur here.

https://imgur.com/a/8aI74Nz

View: https://imgur.com/a/8aI74Nz

And the drive was detected on it's own. The day after, I plugged the disc drive as well and only then it stopped detecting both. I'd have to check that again, seems to be a hit or miss every time.

 

[alanvatrox]

A little update:

I found the manual for this disk and the jumpers are on the board of the disk. It said it shipped on Master mode by default and no one in almost 20 years has touched the disk so that isn't a problem here.

I've tried it with another motherboard (previous one being P5E3, this one being the actual P5Q3 which has legacy SATA), it did work for a second, it detected both IDE disk and disc drive with blue colors but after getting a boot error from booting from another disk that had no OS, I restarted and then it would hang for around 30 seconds on "Detecting drives...". While it did that I noticed that the HDD light from both the PC case and, weirdly enough, under the disk itself, it blinked 6 times with a small pause in between.

After this, I unplugged the IDE disc drive and it only took 4-5 seconds for the IDE disk to show red and blinking before proceeding with the boot, just like with the other motherboard.

I managed to get my Windows XP running and I successfully did a backup of the disk like a charm!

Now, my question still remains and I suppose only ASUS' personnel really knows this, but I wonder what that blinking red drive detection means. I couldn't find it on the Hard Disk Drives section of the BIOS but it could be detected by an OS just fine.