🚀 go-pugleaf

If anyone can solve this problem then you will earn my infinite
gratitude (and a pint if you are ever in Barnes, London).

I have a Western Digital Caviar 31600 which has been giving good
service as the slave drive in the primary IDE channel for over a year
now.  I have tried to change it to the master drive (with a Quantum
Fireball TM3200 as slave) and have run into a problem - it starts
giving write errors on the FAT when accessing files and when an
attempt is made to format it (at the point Format writes the FAT after
the percentage complete has reached 100%) and Scandisk complains that
the second cluster contains bad blocks.  However, there are
circumstances where the drive works perfectly so the fault does not
actually seem to be a problem with bad blocks.

If it is configured as the master drive on the secondary IDE channel
with an NEC CDR260 CD-ROM drive as slave then it works perfectly.

If it is configured as the slave drive on the primary IDE channel with
a WDAC31000 as master then it works perfectly.

If it is configured as the only drive on the primary IDE channel then
it gives the write and scandisk errors.

If it is configured as the master drive on the primary IDE channel
with the Quantum Fireball TM3200 as slave then it gives the write and
scandisk errors.

I have ensured that the jumper for the master/slave setting was
correctly seated and that cable connections seemd to be good.

The machine is a Gateway p5-90 with a Plato (OEM?) motherboard running
AMI BIOS 13.AX1T.  The CMOS setting for drive is configured for
autodetect (which results in Logical Block Access).

Has anyone any ideas what might be going on here?  I was hoping to get
Windows 95 installed on this drive yesterday and it was during the
setup that the problem came to light - perhaps I shouldn't have tried
it on Friday 13th!

TIA
Mike


_________________________
Michael Humberston