On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 14:44:13 GMT, "John" wrote:

My eMachine 1860, running WXP, has been flakey on boot for a year now; once
it is on it is fine, but it hands on boot about 20% of the time.
Monday it simply wouldn't come up, hanging on "IOM.SYS" everytime.

I took it in to the shop. They found a cable was nicked and the jumpers
were wrong. They set them to Master and Slave. Now all is well.
However, I checked the manual and it says to set the jumpers to "CS". The
shop says the manual is wrong.
Does it matter as long as the machine is working? Presumably the nicked
cable was the problem the whole time.
Thanks.

The manual isn't exactly 'wrong'. Your shop just had another way of
doing things...and I still do it the way your shop does it. I always
change the jumpers to single drive...or master...or slave.

When you have the drive set to CS, the computer needs to read the
drives each time it boots...and then make a decision as how to handle
them.

With master, etc. settings, you already tell the computer which is
which...and that can speed the boot process. You can speed the
process further by changing the BIOS setting from 'auto' to the actual
parameters needed for that drive.

And, as was noted by someone here, you need a special cable when using
CS.


Have a nice one...

Trent

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