Stange and interesting IDE problem, internal drives

[antiem]

This is a strange but interesting IDE problem.

Out of the blue, my winxp pc froze, requiring a forced power down. I can imagine the chuckles now about my ancient OS. But everything that follows is all BIOS related, OS doesn't come into play.

When powering up, BIOS no longer saw my boot hard drive.

For many, many years I had my boot hard drive and cdrom drive jumpered (correctly) as master/slave with the correct primary IDE cable connections to each. They were assigned the letters C and E by BIOS.

My secondary hard drive was jumpered as cable select and connected to my secondary IDE cable. It was assigned the letter D by BIOS.

After the crash, only the cable select drive on the secondary IDE cable was being recognized by BIOS. It seems that master/slave configurations were no longer recognized. Now only cable select was.

I tried all combinations of the boot hard drive and cdrom drive, singly and together.
No master slave configuration was recognized, only cable select. I even tried swapping the primary and secondary IDE cable, with exactly the same results.

When I jumpered my boot hard drive and cdrom drive to cable select, everything worked, resulting in the same drive letter assignments, and the OS booted up normally.
As a test, when I jumpered my secondary hard drive to master, it too was no longer recognized by BIOS. It was connected to the master connector of the secondary IDE cable.

Any ideas of what could have caused this?
Should I be concerned with an imminent motherboard failure?

Any and all theories welcome

 

[CircuitDaemon]

Have you tried putting the optical drive as Cable Select as the only device? Just to see if the motherboard detects them. It could be that it is failing and the motherboard is not able to detect it, therefore making it believe there's only one device on the cable. That's the only way it could end up not working with a master/slave jumper config. Maybe it's the power supply that's failing and your drives are not being turned on properly, also causing the master/slave config unusable. It does sound weird, but as you already attempted, your known config from before should work and I understand why you would want to know what caused it.

I'd start by testing both hard drives and the optical drive on another computer just to make sure they work without issues (but it seems like you are already sure the hard drives do work)

After that, I'd try with another power supply, preferably new. The main goal should be getting the same config you had working again.

 

[antiem]

Have you tried putting the optical drive as Cable Select as the only device? Just to see if the motherboard detects them. It could be that it is failing and the motherboard is not able to detect it, therefore making it believe there's only one device on the cable. That's the only way it could end up not working with a master/slave jumper config. Maybe it's the power supply that's failing and your drives are not being turned on properly, also causing the master/slave config unusable. It does sound weird, but as you already attempted, your known config from before should work and I understand why you would want to know what caused it.

I'd start by testing both hard drives and the optical drive on another computer just to make sure they work without issues (but it seems like you are already sure the hard drives do work)

After that, I'd try with another power supply, preferably new. The main goal should be getting the same config you had working again.

 

[antiem]

Yes, I tried connecting each drive individually. In each case, BIOS would see it if it was jumpered CS, and BIOS would not see it if it was jumpered master.

Actually, I neglected to say that I did test out the boot hard drive on another PC, jumpered as master, and it worked fine. That's when I began to suspect that it wasn't a drive failure and the experimenting began.

Have you seen a power supply problem cause something like this? It seems logical that it could be something like that, but it's weird that the only effect is that master/slave no longer works on IDE devices and everything else works fine. I'm actually responding to you from the PC in question.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

 

[CircuitDaemon]

It hasn't exactly happened to me that way, but in theory the only way for a working setup to fail like that under your circumstances would be to have some sort of disconnection. As you seem to be using the same IDE cables, I doubt that's a cause since they work on CS. Most boards that were made in the last few years before IDE became obsolete, would work fine with all devices as CS. I'd still be confused as to why it stopped working in the first place, but I don't think it's a motherboard problem.

Lets hope someone here can come up with another theory, not many people who are still around are used to computers before sata became common.

 

[antiem]

It hasn't exactly happened to me that way, but in theory the only way for a working setup to fail like that under your circumstances would be to have some sort of disconnection. As you seem to be using the same IDE cables, I doubt that's a cause since they work on CS. Most boards that were made in the last few years before IDE became obsolete, would work fine with all devices as CS. I'd still be confused as to why it stopped working in the first place, but I don't think it's a motherboard problem.

Lets hope someone here can come up with another theory, not many people who are still around are used to computers before sata became common.