Big hard drive problem

[krose at theory.lcs.mit.edu (Kyle Rose)]

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>      My IDE hard drive is about to ____ the bed.  I've got a 5.2 Gig IDE 
>      drive to replace it with, but there's a problem.  I've got a '94 
>      Gateway P60.  My IDE CDROM wont coexist with the big drive.  If I can 
>      see the HD, I can't find the CDROM.  Most configurations simply freeze 
>      up when trying to boot.
>      
>      Any suggestions?  Someone must have had this problem before me.
>      
>      There are downlaodable BIOS available.  Would these solve my problem?  
>      They seem to be for Win95...  I don't have that.

So, I have a Gateway P5-60 from December 1993, and it has only one
IDE channel even though the BIOS (AMI) supports 2.  This may be the
situation you have.  If that is the case, then the CDROM shouldn't
work at all -- the interface is really IDE, not EIDE or ATAPI, even
though the BIOS supports LBA translations for larger hard drives.

It's possible that you have a later BIOS revision than I do which
actually gives you an ATAPI interface; I suspect this is the case
because you imply that you can find the CDROM without the large drive
installed.

In this case, I've found that funky jumper settings cause the BIOS to
hang waiting for it to locate a drive on that channel.  Make sure that
you have the hard drive set for master and the CDROM set for slave; if
for whatever reason you can't set the CDROM for slave, set the hard
drive as the slave.  This is the rather inane way that IDE determines
how many devices are on the channel.  I don't understand the
engineering behind it, so I can't explain it further. =)

If you absolutely can't get your BIOS to recognize both at the same
time, try setting your BIOS to only look for one drive.  In this case, 
it sounds like it would find the hard drive and not the CDROM.  Linux, 
in any case, should still find both devices if the IDE interface is
working properly.  However, you may not have a "Not Installed" option, 
which would be bad. =(

Let me know what revision BIOS you're using, because I might be able
to find out more.

Kyle


- -- 
Kyle R. Rose                      "They can try to bind our arms,
Laboratory for Computer Science    But they cannot chain our minds
MIT NE43-309, 617-253-5883             or hearts..."
http://web.mit.edu/krr/www/                           Stratovarius
krose at theory.lcs.mit.edu                              Forever Free
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