Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with IDE

Hard drive pain.

gjc — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:15:04 -0800

Highly technical hard drive filter: My hard drive failed. Came home, and PC was sitting at the "where's my hard drive" BIOS screen, to my great horror. My question is more of a "please confirm my diagnosis" and "what have I missed" sort of thing. Hard drive does not spin at all. In fact, it does nothing at all. Doesn't spin, click, hum, vibrate, whine. And the PC doesn't see it.

I looked at the controller board and could find no burnt spots nor any visual indication that something was fried. I even pulled off the board to make sure the contacts were clean. Completely fine, visually. If I give the drive a twist along the axis of the platters, I can hear them move, so I know the platters aren't stuck. And there is nothing rattling around inside.

So my thinking is that the controller simply went belly up, and if I go out and get another identical hard drive and swap controllers, it will function long enough to get the data off. I have done this in the past with success, on an older IDE drive of the 4GB vintage. This drive is a 7 year old SATA drive.

But there are comments on websites saying that there is "tuning" information on the controller, and thus it won't work. I'm not sure I believe that- sounds more like scare tactics perpetrated by data recovery people to drum up business. But maybe not? Is the bad sector table stored on the board?

Anyway, thanks in advance.

IDE RAID Enclosure

chunking express — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:02:16 -0800

Does anyone know good IDE Raid enclosures? I currently own two 250 gig IDE hard drives and want to set them up in a single RAID enclosure. I have been looking around for a while but can only find SATA raid enclosures. I'm asking for my brother. He currently owns the Netgear SC101 and says it didn't really work that great.

computer help: IDE HDD and SATA DVD drive: why does the computer freeze up on start-up?

Jhoosier — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 06:58:57 -0800

Would IDE HDD and SATA DVD drives confuse each other on boot up? How do I tell if my dvd drive is mucked up? My dvd drive finally crapped out on me after 2 years, so I went out and got a new one. While looking, I saw the SATA one wasn't any more expensive than the Ultra IDE one, so I got it. I'd bought a SATA HDD and a IDE one for storage when I built the rig 2 yrs before, though the SATA crashed and burned about 4 months after I got it. Living in Japan and the warranty being for the US, a $50 HDD wasn't worth the hassle to mail it back to be checked out and all that, so I made do with my IDE one.

Anyways, after getting the dvd drive, things were going ok for a month or so, then it started freezing quite a bit and I'd have to restart. Eventually, it got to the point that the computer would freeze on the XPC splash screen and not do anything. Upon booting, it will show the graphics card info, then go to the Shuttle XPC splash screen and freeze. On a normal boot, it would then try to boot from the dvd drive, but since there's never anything bootable there, it moves on to the HDD. After unplugging the dvd drive, everything works AOK. So it's probably something to do with my dvd drive. Do you think it's a bad drive, or are the SATA and IDE confusing each other and something's messed up? Any suggestions are much appreciated.

NoIWillNotFixYourComputerFilter

Lockeownzj00 — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:49:42 -0800

NoIWillNotFixYourComputerFilter: I've got a 500 gig that won't show up in Windows XP. Help! So I bought this 500 gig IDE drive. I'm using Windows XP SP2. I installed it in my box. My BIOS sees it. Windows doesn't. In Disk Manager, I see it as a 128 gig drive, but it still doesn't appear in Explorer (even if it did, I want those other 372 other gigs dammit). I tried using this firmware update via floppy for my hard drive controller (promise ide ultra100 tx2), but booting it up yielded a split screen: half was the menu, half was blackness.

So uh. wtf? I've scoured google and found people with similar problems, especially people with SATA drives. But that's not what I've got, so. Could anybody lend me some pearls of wisdom? I'm pretty sure it's not a loose ribbon.

ATA cable confusion

crapmatic — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:08:40 -0800

Computer question: Last week I posted this question trying to replace a hard drive. Now I have a new problem... the hard drive uses a connector type that I've never seen before and it doesn't agree with what Wikipedia shows. To summarize, in my last post, my 3.2 GB hard drive died in an ancient laptop and I wanted to replace it. I opted to try replacing it with a compact flash card hooked up to an ATA adapter.

The ATA adapter NewEgg sent me uses a 40-pin connection exactly as this pin diagram shows.

The connector on the laptop and the dead hard drive uses a smaller 44-pin layout with no separate power connector. The pitch of the pins is smaller, so I can't force the parts to mate even if I wanted to.

To add further confusion, all the sites selling a MHD2032AT claim that this is an Ultra ATA/33 drive. Wikipedia's ATA article implies that Ultra ATA/33 uses the 40-pin cable.

What's going on here?

USB IDE

king walnut — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:47:25 -0800

What's a good product for reading old IDE and EIDE drives through USB? I have a bunch of old drives that I'd like to get at, but I don't have a desktop computer any more. What's a good device for doing this? I'd need something that supplies its own power to the drive.

Windows XP, if it matters.

My MadDog enclosure should be called HotDog

penciltopper — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:48:40 -0800

My new HD enclosure gets really hot. Should I worry? I just got one of these and although it's just what I wanted, it's still really HOT after copying 40gb onto it two hours ago.

Not having an IR thermometer handy I'd say it's holding-hot-coffee-in-a-paper-cup hot.
Uncomfortable in the hand; wouldn't want it in my lap.

It says it's anodized metal, but it feels like plastic.
There doesn't seem to be any venting; but does a HD in a box need to be vented?
I've got it oriented vertically on its stand for maximum heat dissipation, but I can't see that making much difference.

I'm worried that I'm going to bake my data right off the thing. It has to be plugged in and turned on 24/7.

Should I just take the drive out and drill some air holes in the enclosure? Will that let the magic out?

Or is it b0rken and I should send it back as the Ford Pinto of HD enclosures?

Connect my drive to my mac please!

smithmac_99 — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:40:47 -0800

How do I connect my NTFS hard drive to my new mac? Based on this question, I yanked my old drives and put them in a USB 2.0 enclosure. I can plug them in to my laptop and they mount fine, but when I plug them into my mac, zippo...What did I do wrong?

How to take an internal hard drive and make it external

smithmac_99 — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 21:07:30 -0800

What do I need to know about hard drive enclosures? My computer (PC) died this morning and I want to pull out the 2 hard drives and use them as external drives for my new Mac. I don't know if they're FAT32 or NTFS. I don't know if they're IDE or SATA. How do I find out? Do I need to? A little background on my old PC. It was one of the first P4 3.0 PCs with hyperthreading technology. I've had it for ~4 years

AHCI gives me a headache...

lou — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:14:59 -0800

Hard Drive Filter: Someone explain to me how SATA and AHCI work. I got some new computer parts. I've been building my own systems for nearly eight years now and it's the best way for me to learn the in's and out's of my system. This is the first time I've had an SATA capable motherboard and an SATA hard drive, and so far it's been nothing but headaches. I *suspect* a lot of the headaches has to do with the fact that I do *not* want to do a fresh install of my operating system (although, if that is all that is needed to take away all my headaches, please confirm). I'm on a copy of WinXP from university a few years back -- not quite sure about all the legal ramifications of using still using their OS, but I'm not interested in that discussion right now. However -- just in case Microsoft disables my computer remotely or whatever is up their sleeves -- I disabled Automatic Updates and don't have Service Pack 1 or 2. That might also make a difference. So. Onto the questions.

1. My new motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R (that's this one). If you look on their drivers list, there's a section for SATA RAID drivers, an Intel one for their Northbridge controller and a GSATA one for a second controller (by JMicron?). As I understand it I need to install these drivers for WinXP to recognize SATA drives. Do these drivers work for *ALL* SATA modes, even if it's specifically labeled as RAID? (I'm not looking for a RAID setup.) It looks like I need to install these drivers even if I want to just use the SATA controller in IDE mode -- is this true?

2. I'd like to enable AHCI to make the most of my SATA drives. So far, I know that I'm supposed to do a repair install of WinXP, load up the RAID driver (even if I don't want RAID), and then change the BIOS setting to make the hard drive work in AHCI mode. So I tried that on the GSATA controller and I got WinXP to boot-- huzzah! BUT -- the drives on the IDE controller disappeared! I only see my SATA hard drive, and not my IDE hard drive and CD-DVD drive which is on the IDE controller. Are AHCI and IDE mutually exclusive or incompatible? If a system is on AHCI is IDE disabled? If so, why doesn't this warning exist anywhere? Or did I do something wrong?

3. Do I need to load the SATA drivers *everytime* I do a repair install? Would I be able to install two drivers, one for each controller, on a single install?

What kind of a converter do I need to backup my laptop hard drive?

Pontius Pilate — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 20:36:20 -0800

What kind of a converter do I need to backup my laptop hard drive? My HP Pavilion dv4000 has officially been rendered inoperable (looks like the VGA adapter is not working). I need to back up all my files before I send it in to be repaired, and I've heard about converters that allow you to connect a notebook hard drive to a desktop computer via USB. However, after looking at the different models of converters, I am really confused - do I need a 2.5-inch or a 3.5-inch bay? How do I make sure that I get a notebook-to-USB converter and not some IE model?

Any help would be appreciated!

(Oh, and may as well throw this in - is there any way to output my laptop to a desktop monitor if the VGA adapter is not working? The laptop itself seems to go through the boot-up process okay - it's just that the screen remains black.)

How do I streamline my coding and work habits?

treepour — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 10:02:38 -0800

What coding habits and working methodologies help you maximize productivity while reducing angst? So I'm picking up more business and shifting my life/career gradually into full-time freelance web programming work. Right now, I'm working mostly in PHP, implementing and tweaking various CMS's (primarily Drupal and Wordpress), but I'm also picking up some flash/actionscript work, and occasionally call on my previous experience coding in PERL. I like the trajectory I'm on and want to continue expanding both the depth and breadth of my skills and knowledge.

However, I'm beginning to feel that my working/coding habits are more haphazard and cumbersome than they should be -- sometimes I find myself tripping over my own shoelaces. E.g., I find myself saying things like this to myself more often than I'd like to admit: "Where did I make that change? Where did I see that function? Oh, wait, it was in the previous version of the file that I just overwrote. Ok, I know that function xyz is somewhere in the bottom 3/4 of the file -- should I just scroll until I find it or do I need to do a search for the function name?"

This sort of tripping-over-my-shoelaces thing didn't happen as frequently when I had only 1 project at a time; but as I take on more projects, it's happening more frequently. In short, I've realized that if I'm going to continue in this line of work, I need to develop some better habits and strategies.

So far, I've done most of my coding/editing/etc with a fairly simple text editor (Crimson Edit). I generally set up a mirror of the site on my local Windows machine running apache, mysql, etc, then FTP files up to the server. However, I realize that some people swear by IDE's like Eclipse, and others use utilities like grep, awk, etc., to facilitate coding.

So I'm looking for recommendations on streamlining my coding/work habits/experience. I know there's not a one-size-fits-all approach, so any suggestions/advice will be greatly appreciated.

Need a UK gadget fix..

ascullion — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 06:58:16 -0800

Does anyone know a UK supplier for one of these little gadgets?

CF to IDE

popcassady — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 09:13:54 -0800

How can I plug an IDE hard drive into a compact flash slot? I'd like to attach a hard drive to my camera via its compact flash slot. Research leads me to believe that this might be possible. Seems like there are plenty solutions for doing it the other way round.

I've been looking for some kind of connector that will plug into the compact flash slot but my search has been unsuccesful. I imagine someone out there might sell a CF cable (sort of a mini IDE cable).

Does anyone have any ideas? Does such a connector exist?

Ruby code completion in Emacs, Intellisense-style?

dmd — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:09:56 -0800

Rcodetools, possibly in conjunction with Icicles, seems like it should be the bee's knees for doing Ruby code completion in Emacs. I need help getting it to actually work. Does anyone have this working properly? Could you talk me through it in baby steps? The existing documentation seems rather sparse, and assumes you're already quite proficient in Emacs lisp.

I did manage at one point to get as far as actually having rcodetools do some completion, but it behaves weirdly. For example, if I'm in an empty buffer and type 42. and execute rct-complete-symbol, it happily obliges and gives me all the methods available to an Integer. But suppose instead I type

def foo 42. end
and, with point after 42., execute rct-complete-symbol, then it tells me no completions are found. What gives?

Anyway - any help greatly appreciated. I greatly miss IntelliSense from Ruby in Visual Studio now that I'm on a Mac full time, and I'm really hoping emacs can do at least some of what VS does.

Why won't my BIOS recognize a SATA drive?

malaprohibita — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 17:37:57 -0800

Why won't my BIOS recognize a SATA drive? I have a four-year old Dell 4500s with no SATA support on the motherboard. I bought and installed a PCI SATA card that seems to be recognized just fine, but the BIOS does not find a drive. I also tried an IDE/SATA adapter, but there's still no joy: the BIOS will not recognize that a hard drive is attached at all. I even tried clearing the NVRAM, but still no luck.

Since this is a small case, there's no room for leaving the original IDE drive and just adding the SATA. Is this just a case of old, outdated motherboard and BIOS, or am I missing something?

The weather forecast calls for interrupt storms...

perissodactyl — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 10:01:37 -0800

Help! I added an internal IDE hard drive to my late-model Dell desktop, and accessing it pins my processor! I've got a Dell XPS 400 with Windows XP MCE. Because the computer's main internal drive bus is serial ATA, I attached a plain old Maxtor IDE to the computer via a PATA interface designed for a removable drive.

Now, whenever I access files on the drive, one of the processor cores pins at 100% utilization, my desktop becomes rather unresponsive, and file access takes *forever*. I suspect there's some sort of "interrupt storm" going on.

So... what is wrong, and how can I fix it?

Must connect the male bit to the female bit! IDEs and SATAs!

bkudria — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 18:18:13 -0800

Is there such a thing as an IDE to SATA converter? I have an SATA hard drive and a IDE-to-USB enclosure. I'd like to keep the enclosure and not buy another because I am a cheap (and I really like it). Can I buy a cheap, small (so it fits inside the enclosure!) IDE-SATA converter/adapter? Do such things exist? Is it even technically possible?

Thanks!

What is the port on this hard drive?

sian — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:06:03 -0800

Attempting to plug my old hard drive into an enclosure, but I don't know what this port is or how it connects. Pictures inside. I'm pretty hardware-useless, so hopefully someone can send me in the right direction. I bought this enclosure. My hard drive is a Seagate ST94Q11A that came with an HP 2100 series notebook.

[1] - The drive and the weird port.

[2] - Close-up of the port

[3] - The port on the enclosure.

[4] - The two ports are the same size, so one cannot plug into the other.

[5] - Probably the clearest picture.

I'm really sorry for the webcam pictures! I thought they would do; my camera is loaned out until next week.

Is there an adapter that I need? How do I get this darn thing connected? From the reviews on Newegg, it looks like it should just plug in easily, but the port on the hard drive is goofy and my geeky pals could not identify it, either.

Need help with PCI to IDE controller card

flyby22 — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 08:19:20 -0800

Having problem with S.M.A.R.T data collection apps with IDE drives on a PCI to IDE card. I have one of these PCI to IDE controller cards either from Sabrent or Syba. Both of these companies seem to sell almost identical cards based on Silicon Image chip.

http://www.sabrent.com/products/specs/SBT-RDIT.htm

This supports RAID. But I have not set it up to use RAID. I have an Abit AN7 mobo with an AMD Sempron CPU. This card is supposed to allow attaching up to 4 IDE drives.

On the primary channel I have two drives hooked up in Cable Select mode and using removable drive cages. On the secondary channel I have only one drive in Cable Select mode and using a similar removable cage.

Whenever I try to use one of those Hard disk monitoring apps that collect S.M.A.R.T data I get a hang when the apps gets to these drives and in the event viewer I see a timeout event. I dont have the exact message here with me. Then after a while I need to basically reboot the machine because everything starts to hang soon after this.

I have narrowed the problem down to connecting two drives to the primary channel. I did not try adding two drives to the secondary channel since I need to open the case and juggle things to do that. But as soon as I remove any one of the drives on the primary channel the SMART apps work fine. Do not know if the removable drive cages have anything do with it, or whether the card is bad, or I need to enable some settings somewhere.

I dont think the drives are the problem because I have tried a few different disk drives that I have lying around.

I was wonderinf if somebody has any idea about what may be the problem.

Oh, I wasn't supposed to bang it that hard?

thejoshu — Tue, 23 May 2006 17:49:50 -0800

An internal serial ATA (SATA) 3.5" hard drive pulled from an iMac G5 (the iMac is not accessible). A FireWire IDE enclosure. I live in Brooklyn and want some place open tonight (magically) or early tomorrow to find either a USB2 adapter for the SATA drive, a cheap USB2/FireWire enclosure, or an SATA>IDE adapter so I can use my current enclosure. (Give me any ideas that don't involve J&R.) Bonus points for Brooklyn - other boroughs are cool too, or any of these devices on loan from someone extremely generous would also be awesome!

Simple C IDE

mr.dan — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 08:08:00 -0800

I'm looking for a simple C IDE. I like CodeWarrior, but it 's not in distribution anymore.

I've never developed in C before, but when I programmed in Java I used JCreator. I want a simple interface that requires minimal configuration and has basic syntax highlighting.

Just C, not C++.

Computer upgrade options

Elpoca — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 20:25:43 -0800

I'd like to upgrade my 4 year old Dell Dimension 8200 computer, while hopefully getting components that I could use later, should I decide to build a whole new system in a few months. Sadly, I know nearly nothing about computer hardware. The system specifications (from the Dell support site) are:

3K363 PROCESSOR, 80531, 1.8G, 0, 400FSB, SOCKET N, D0
8G894 ASSEMBLY, CARD (CIRCUIT), PLANAR (MOTHERBOARD), DIM8200, NO-RSR
4T234 RAMBUS INLINE MEMORY MODULE, 128, 400M, 64X16, 4C, 40
9578D CARD (CIRCUIT), MEMORY BOARD, MEMORY, PRINTED WIRING BOARD, CONTINUITY, RAMBUS

Despite what (I think) is shown above, my system has 256MB of memory, but I'd still like to get more. Unfortunately, from what I can ascertain, my system takes RDRAM, and cheap memory of this type doesn't seem to exist. Am I mistaken in my system's memory type? Or, does cheap RDRAM exist? Could another type of memory be used instead?

I'm also thinking about getting a larger hard drive. I've read that SATA hard drives are better. Is this true? Can my system connect to a SATA drive? Or, if not, if I get an IDE drive, will it still be able to connect to motherboards in a couple years?

Finally, and if necessary, is it possible to replace the motherboard and processor in my computer? I've heard that with Dells, replacing major hardware components is not always possible.

Basically, I'm trying to cheaply upgrade my system now (while I'm poor), while getting components that I can use later in a new system (when I'm less poor). Is this possible, or am I stuck with what I've got?

I've googled for answers to these questions but I'm still unclear on many things. I'd appreciate some expert opinions!

XML/ XSL Tools

yerfatma — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 13:16:39 -0800

What's your favorite XML IDE? I'm looking for something that will show me the results of XPATH queries on the fly and transform XML via a stylesheet inside the tool. I've found bits and pieces of what I'm looking for in things like Xselerator, XPath Explorer and a number of pay tools (most notably XML Spy). I'm not opposed to paying for a tool, but XML Spy is a bit pricey for what I need.

I also have a lot of options laying around that may already do what I need and I just don't know it. At work I have HomeSite, VS.NET and Komodo along with a bunch of things I've downloaded and never used.

In sum: how are we rolling XML-wise nowadays?

No IDEa about hard drives

twine42 — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 02:47:39 -0800

Can I add more than just four IDE devices to my PC? I've got a stack of old hard discs knocking around here, and it seems a waste to just ditch them. Is there any way I can use them in my PC?

Logically I must be able to (or else why fit PCs with four 5inch and six 3 inch bays) but IDE cables only support two devices. What gives?