[CentOS] OT Problem seeing slave drives.

Tue Apr 5 20:02:41 UTC 2011
Jimmy Bradley <bmobile40 at ocellaris.net>

On Tue, 2011-04-05 at 12:14 -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
> On 04/05/11 11:37 AM, Jimmy Bradley wrote:
> >       This isn't specifically about cent os, but I am running cent os on
> > this machine. I've got a Dell Dimension 2400 desktop pc. I've tried on a
> > number of occasions to put a second hard drive in the machine, but I
> > can't get the machine to recognize the second drive in BIOS. I'm going
> > to try and keep this short and sweet. I've tried all that I know to try.
> > I've set the jumpers on the drives to master and slave, I've tried
> > setting the jumpers to cable select. I've changed the IDE ribbon cable.
> > As far as I know, I've done all the trouble shooting steps that you'd do
> > when having this problem.
> 
> 
> (Googles a bit) Ok, thats a Intel 845GV chipset[1], which supports 
> UDMA100[2], so you must use 80 wire UDMA style IDE cables or get very 
> unreliable results.
> 
> wow, thats some old chit.

    I have some chit, that's older than that. I also have a dell L500R
that I acquired from my step dad's mom. She's in a nursing home
suffering from dementia, so she doesn't know if it's Monday, or July
4,1776.
    Anyway, normally I would've just scrapped a machine that old for
parts, but I didn't feel like it would be the right thing to do, since
she's still alive. So, on a whim, I stuck a 500gig hard drive in it,
which the bios saw, and I loaded White box 4 on it, and I use it as a
archiving/file storage machine.
    The machine runs just fine. It's got 512mb of ram in it, and super
fast 433 mghrtz intel celeron cpu. It'll run circles around a comodore
vic 20, or a TRS 80.

Jim
  
> 
> With UDMA cables, they must be plugged in the correct way, the blue 
> connector goes to the mainboard, the far end black connector goes to the 
> 'master' (1st) drive, and the middle gray connector goes to the slave 
> (2nd) drive.  The drives should be jumpered as 'cable select' (but you 
> /can/ use master/slave jumpering as LONG as they are connected in the 
> correct order).    The connectors should all be 'keyed' by a rectangular 
> block molded on one side such that you can't plug them in the wrong way. 
>    There also should be a missing pin on the mobo and drives and a 
> blocked pin on the cable that acts as a key.   Both devices on the cable 
> should be UDMA 100 capable, mixing older technology DMA33 stuff was bad 
> news and resulted in all kinda funky behavior.
> 
> phew, [1] indicates that system has 2 dimm slots with support for 256M 
> and 512M dimms (DDR SDRAM), onboard shared memory graphics, and only has 
> one internal drive bay, and a 200 or 230W PSU.   Pentium-4 w/ 400 or 
> 533Mhz FSB so its probably Northwood generation, circa 2002.    The CMOS 
> battery is likely a ball of toxic green fuzz right now.   Frankly, 
> anything that old, when it starts misbehaving, its time for the recycle bin.
> 
> [1] http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim2400/en/sm_en/specs.htm
> 
> [2] page 28 
> http://downloadmirror.intel.com/15210/eng/D845GVSR_TechProdSpec.pdf 
> <http://downloadmirror.intel.com/15210/eng/D845GVSR_TechProdSpec.pdf>
>          [different board, but same chips and better documentation]
> 
> 
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