Plextor problem

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twist

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Hello faithful homerecers. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. Personnally, I'm embarrassed to say how generous Santa was to me. I hope some of you can say the same.

I started building my DAW last Christmas, and I finally put the lid on the case for the first time this year after installing the enermax power supply I just got. These babies are great. Compared to a stock supply, the weight alone should tell you something. It's whisper quiet. Now all I can hear is the CPU fan. Maybe I shouldn't have put the lid on yet!

I still have one bug in the system though. When I power it up, the bios checks the ram, and detects the IDE drives. It finds everything OK except for my Plextor burner. Then I power down the system and reboot, and it recognizes the Plextor. Exact same scenario everytime.

ABIT recomended a a BIOS upgrade, so I did that. Plextor recomended a firmware upgrade so I did that. ABIT also recomended trying a different IDE cable, so I did that. Still the same old problem. The strangest thing is, it did work for a short time early in the assembly process. Now it never works until I reboot. I don't remember changing anything that would affect it. I'm stumped, and it's the last thing keeping me from putting the lid back on.

Any thoughts?


Twist
 
No help, just a similar story.

I had a Plextor burner and a Abit mobo as well. Intermittently I would boot and Windows would not see the Plextor (although it was being detected in the POST while booting). Usually a simple reboot would fix the problem. Annoying, but not life or death.

As time went on, the problem seemed to get worse. It would happen more frequently and I would sometimes have to reboot multiple times before I could get the OS to recognize the CD-RW. Eventually the mobo died on me (prematurely, as it was just a little over a year old when it went belly-up). I don't know if the premature death and the failure to recognize the CD were at all related. However, I was never able to fix the CD problem, despite trying about everything imaginable (new firmware, BIOS update, Windows updates, etc.).

I now have an Asus board in the same exact system, and I have no problems at all.

FWIW, the Abit board (BX-133RAID) had a RAID controller built into it (total of 4 IDE controllers - 2 standard and 2 ATA-100 RAID). The Asus board is a standard configuration with 2 IDE controllers. I don't know if that has any bearing on the issue either.
 
Interesting story Dachay, mine just happens to be a BX-133 RAID also. You're right, it's not life and death. I guess I'll just live with it till I replace the mobo.

Thanks for the reply.

Twist
 
I second your comments on the Enermax power supplies, they're just great. They also make some really nice case fans (I love the gold!). Very solid equipment...has good weight, runs great.

Anyhow, you might try setting up all your drives in the BIOS instead of using auto detect. Also, make sure that Plextor is on the Intel controller (the "main" one on the board) and not the garbage 3rd party controller (probably highpoint or promise). Is the drive a slave or a master with a connected slave? If it's either, then try it all by itself as master on a channel and see what happens.

I've seen similar odd behavior in the past, and have rarely found a good solution. You might try hitting CTRL+ALT+DELETE right after the detection process when starting cold to force a soft restart which will often result in the drive magically showing up, and save you from having to do a cold restart.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Thanks Slack. Yes it's secondary master, no slave. I'll probably just live with it for now. But I will try the ctrl alt delete trick. That would save a few minutes.


Twist
 
i have had the same problem with my asus motherboard. so i got a new one, an MSI... it works better but still happens. i think it is a combination of hardward and software problems.
 
Check your Plextor on a different PC.
If you get the same problem, suspect the Plextor.
 
Hey, thanks for all the replies! I did try different CD-ROM drives in that same slot, and they worked fine. I'll try hardware central. Thanks again, and Happy New Year!

Twist
 
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