"envoy" wrote in message
. 178...
Here is a strange development. I am building a system from scavanged
parts with some new stuff thrown in, but that is not the strange
part.

I am using a an ASUS A7S-VM mobo with an WD400BB (40 gig) hard drive.
I did not have a nice ATA100 IDE cable so I popped in an old ATA33
ribbon cable. The bios not only recognized the HD but also detected
the cable correctly and reported that it could not use UDMA mode 3, 4
and 5, so it would used it as a ATA 33 drive. Cool.

After getting it partitiond and formatted and the os installed, I
bought a ATA-100/133 cable.

Okay now here is the strange part.

When I replace the old ribbon cable with the ATA-100 cable (blue plug
to the mobo, black plug to the hd) it can no longer see the master
boot record even though the bios still detects the drive correctly
except this time it says the UDMA modes 3-5 are can be used.

So with the new cable installed it thinks the HD is a virgin,
unpartitioned drive. I tried this with the jumpers on the drive set
for single master and cable select. No change.

Then when I reinstalled the old ribbon cable the MBR and partition
info reappeared and the system boots without problems.

Does anybody know what is going on here? It looks like when the
ATA100 cable is used it is looking for the master boot record in a
different location than with the ATA 33 ribbon cable.

Things checked:
- correct ide plugs used.
- plugs are keyed (cannot be plugged in the wrong way)
- jumper setting - tried both :"single master" and "cable select"

Of course, my knee-jerk response was "Bad Cable!" but I want to make
sure I am not tripping over my own shoe-laces before a take the cable
back for an exchange.

Ideas?

--
mark


Remove the jumper completely and try
again............................................. .....