Feb 23: BIOS IDE Detection Hell

OK, I admit... It's been a while since I put together a PC. But this is really too weird. At startup, even before having an OS installed, there was a tremendous delay when the BIOS tried to detect the IDE devices. Just two, a hard disk drive on the primary and a CDROM on the secondary. How hard can that be to detect?

Well appearently very hard, because the waiting started to bother me from the first boot I had to make. So you start tweaking the BIOS settings. The BIOS Optimization Guide seemed a good place to start. But allas, whatever I tried it was of no use.

Hours later, after searching the web for known issues with my drives and/or mobo, I finally keyed the right phrase into google and asked 'slow boot in bios'. And there my answer was, only one click and some scrolling away. Googles first result, opened a discussion thread called 'Slow Booting' and hidden under 'Response Number 6' I found what I was looking for.

Hold on: the jumpers on the IDE devices need to be set to cable select. The setting master is not good enough anymore. Why, why, WHY!?
Posted by Twan Jacobs in Infra Comments: (6) Trackbacks: (0)

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#1 - Bart said:
2007-02-24 16:13 - (Reply)

Hmm,

I think this is not a case of setting the jumpers to cable select. That is either very very buggy detection by the BIOS or faulty cables/devices that would cause these slow detections.

I'd rather check to see if the devices are jumpered in the right way. Say the Hard disk on the Master and the optical device on the slave. And also don't forget that the colours on the connectors of the IDE-cable (as you should be using a 80-wired cable for ata-66 and up devices) also have an important meaning: Blue represents the system or board connector and MUST be connected to the motherboard always! Then Black is for the Master device and Grey for the Slave (swapping them never gave me any problems, but they must have given different colours for some reason).

Just my 2 cents :-)

#1.1 - Bart said:
2007-02-24 17:47 - (Reply)

Oh yeah, I forgot, to bad I can't edit my last comment by the way.

Try updating the BIOS software to the latest version. It usually won't hurt and if you're still testing anyway problems may resolve or surface by doing so. Actually I never had a bad experience with updating a BIOS. But that doesn't mean it's fool-proof.

Oh, yeah, another thing, I don't think this was the case but, you didn't jumper both devices as Master and connected them on the same (ide)cable?
Anyway, to get the best results in speed from your IDE-devices, try to use a separate IDE-cable to connect them and set them as master. If for example you are unable to do so because of more then 2 devices or to little IDE-controllers on the board, use a setup like this:

Primary
** Master - HDD
** Slave - HDD/Optical-Reader(use only as last resort)
 Secondary
** Master - Optical-Burner/HDD
** Slave - Optical-Reader/HDD

True, because of Burn-proof and similar techniques a burner does not need to be set as Master, but because of the speed of today's burners it's better to do so anyway.
Having a second hard-drive set as Secondary Slave it preferred (when using a optical-burner) because the burner is usually not nearly used/accessed as much as the HDD and so speed and access-time is nearly not impacted (though burning from, or accessing, the second HDD will be speed-impacted).

Ok, enough now, maybe I should be starting my own blog on these kind of subjects ;-)
However, with these extra cents added, it'll probably be enough to get you going.

#1.2 - Twan said:
2007-02-26 13:15 - (Reply)

Hi Bart,

I used two seperate cables with both devices set to master and at the right end of the cables.

BTW, I didn't check for any BIOS updates. So that's still something to look into.

Thanks for the input :-)

#1.2.1 - RichT 2009-04-23 01:50 - (Reply)

I had exactly the same issue and when I changed from MASTER to Cable Select, the boot was lickity-split and it FINALLY resolved my install issue of the drive not being recognised.

#1.2.1.1 - Twan said:
2009-04-23 06:34 - (Reply)

Nice to hear I'm not the only one experiencing this IDE detection quirk...

#2 - Embarrasssed 2009-05-20 05:34 - (Reply)

I'm glad I found this. I'm embarrassed... I work with this stuff all day... I assumed it was on cable select...didn't think it mattered if it was master. I was wrong. Ha ha ..Newman!


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