PC crashes while slave HD present...

R

ReDRuM

New member
specs:

AMD XP 1700+
1GB RAM
Master HD - 40 GB (Maxtor 6E040L0), Slave HD - 80 GB (Seagate ST380011A)
Terratec Phase22 soundcard
G-force Ti4200
WinXP professional, SP2

System crashes (reboots) when the slave HD is present. It first started happening during mixdown in Cubase (all audio projets and Cubase are on the master disc), but today it crashed once during mp3 playback in Winamp... But when I unplug the slave HD's power cord everything works fine.

Anyone?
 
Could be anything. The controller board on the drive could be dying, spewing random crap on the bus that's being intepreted as a DMA request and scribbling over the OS. The power supply could be getting weak (though this would usually prevent the drives from spinning up). The slave drive could be misjumpered as a master and the drives might still (usually) manage to figure out what to do (scary). I've seen stranger.

The best one is that there was a model of CMD646 ATA controller that had a bug that caused bizarre data corruption when a slave drive was present, which could cause a failure paging back in bits of the OS from backing store, which would cause a serious crash. More often than not, though, it just ate data for breakfast. If you have a CMD646U2 rev 5, you'd better turn UDMA off....

That said, odds are probably pretty good that one of the drives is on its way to heaven. With hard drives as low as 35 cents a gig, putting up with flaky drives just doesn't make sense. For $100 online you can buy a 250 gig drive on which you can fit the total capacity of both your drives twice and have room left over.... That's my advice.
 
I forgot...

I get this message during boot up in BIOS (right after memory testing) - SECONDARY IDE CHANNEL NO 80 CONDUCTOR INSTALLED. But the system boots up normally...

It's strange that the PC crashes during mixdown in Cubase because both cubase and all projets are on the master HD which works fine when the slave HD is unplugged...
 
It should work without the 80 wire cable, but it'll only run at the older UDMA33 speed. That is, the controller switches back to 33 speed. It shouldn't cause a fault, just reduce performance. Fitting an 80 wire cable will give full UDMA66 speed for drives that support it, any older UDMA33 drives on that cable should still carry on at the slower speed.

You should try a new 80 wire cable, it gives better performance even with older drives due to the cleaner signal over the cable (the extra wires are screening grounds).
 
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