*Vanguard* wrote:

"John" said in news:FiD%b.10213$UU.7111@lakeread01:
I have a weird boot problem. I have 2 hard drives. And I have
verified the jumper settings and they are correct.

If I have just one hard drive connected, it boots fine.

If I have two hard drives conneted at the same time it doesnt boot.
It gives a disk boot error.

Now the strange part. If I have a bootable cd in the cd rom but it
does not boot from it, it will boot from my hd with out any problems.

Any idea on what could be causing this?

Thanks!

Some things to check (don't know if all apply to your problem):

- If using ATA-66 or faster hard drives, are you using an 80-wire/40-pin
cable to connect them, or are you using an older 40-wire/40-pin cable? The
CD-ROM drive can still use the old 40-wire/40-pin cable since it goes only
to ATA-33, but you'll need to use the 80-wire/40-pin cables for
ATA-66/100/133 hard drives.

This id correct.

- If you are jumpering the hard drives to be master or slave, are you using
a ribbon cable that does NOT have a tiny piece of wire (I think it is for
signal line #34) punched out? If you look close to the end connector on the
cable (I think it's at the end you connect to the motherboard), see if there
is a 1/4" section or so of the ribbon cable that looks like it has been
punched out (so a small piece of the wire for that signal line is gone). If
so, you are using a cable-select ribbon cable and need to configure your
hard drives to use cable select rather than use the master/slave settings.

This is not true. Cable select is determined by pin 28 *not* pin 34, which
is used to detect the presence of an eighty conductor cable. All 80 wire
cables made to ATA spec will work either as jumper select or cable select.
Some have the "cut" conductor you reference, while others achieve the same
results internal to the motherboard connector.

I prefer to manually configure the master/slave relationship of my drives so
I don't use cable-select ribbon cables. For pre-fab computers built in an
assembly line, they don't want to waste time figuring out how to jumper the
drives so they leave them all configured for cable select and then use a
cable-select modified ribbon cable.

There is no such thing--all cables made to the ATA spec can be used.

- Or, do you want to use cable select (which means ALL drives whether for
hard drives or CD-type drives are configured to use cable select AND you use
a cable-select cable)?

See above.

Virg Wall
--

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law