🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <32b1f082.2336509@news.demon.co.uk>, Michael Humberston
<mike@philomel.demon.co.uk> writes
>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!

Dont know whether this helps or is relevant but:

Yesterday I was swapping over some HD's in my son's computer from a 
Seagate 200mb drive to one of my old WD 405mb drives.

So of course I wanted to reformat the WD and then copy over the other 
drive to it and leave him with just the one drive.

I tried the jumpers this way and then that. The book said one setting, a 
copy of the Seagate disk install (from one of my other drives) said 
something entirely different.

In the end, in complete frustration I just took the WD jumper off! Job 
done in 30mins. So much for jumpers.

BTW, the I/o board was a promise 2300. Don't know if that made any 
difference though.

-- 
Philip Martin   ----------------------------------------------------------------
Royal Quays             If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit: 
North Shields.          no use being a damn fool about it !
                                                        W.C. Fields
email philip@philmart.demon.co.uk