IDE Hard Drive issue

[DJChew]

Hello,
I am not some newbie or anything. I have a hard question I wouldl ike to know if anyone else has had the same thing or knows anything about it for sure.

Okay, years ago I installed a CD-ROM on the same IDE channel as a Hard Drive. It just so happens that both were set as Master with the jumpers. After that the hard drive never would get detected by any computer again and the CD-ROM worked fine.

Just the other day my bother did the same thing with two hard drives, now both are not detected by any system.

How can the jumper settings damage the drive??

I got him to try one Master one slave - nothing
Tried one Master - nothing
one slave..... one master with the other slave..... one with cable select... both cable select... still nothing. BIOS will not detect either one.

Does anyone have any ideas about this? It is really not an easy thing to search on Google or where ever... and I am a rather good researcher....

Anyone ever do this before and have the same thing? anyone even had it work?.. lol

Let me know what you all think...

Thanks,
Derek
(Microsoft Enterprise Platform Support)

 

[t5brick]

i have connected drives to the same cable with the same jumper setting(both master/both slave) and never had a problem after i switched the jumpers around.

maybe i've just been lucky...

 

[Snugglebear]

I've been thinking about this a while and can't come up with anything on why this would happen. There's been a number of times over the years when techs I know and even myself have done this, and not once has it resulted in a dead drive. Just last weekend I did it to a couple drives in my fileserver due to lack of sleep, they're both happy. Did you consider ESD, impact, or cabling incorrectly?

 

[DJChew]

No, not ESD. Both times I have ever done it? on two different systems over 2 years apart..
:S

The drives did not receive any hard impact. Defiantly not both of them at the exact same time...

I really want to just get two old drives to test this because I have never done it and had it work. But wasting money... .. If I documented it all and put it up for everyone it may b worth it with two old drives... (less than a GB if I can find any).

And we have tried cables from working machines even, no luck.
Have yet to try another drive that we know works... but still.


I guess I am just cursed.
:'(

 

[hulksterjoe]

I cant think of any reason why it would kill the drives or they wouldnt be detect even as singles

 

[Ice Czar]

http://rockbox.haxx.se/lock.html ???

Ive never had this happen
and it doesnt seem to fit your profile

Unlocking a password protected harddisk
During development of the Rockbox firmware, on several occations the harddisk has become locked, i.e. password protected. This results in the Archos displaying:

Part. Error
Pls Chck HD

We are still not 100% sure why it happened. Theories range from low-power conditions to accidental chip select failure. It has also happened for normal users, using the standard Archos-supplied firmware, although it was more frequent for us developers.

Note: None of us developers have experienced this problem since march 2002.
The disk lock is a built-in security feature in the disk. It is part of the ATA specification, and thus not specific to any brand or device.

A disk always has two passwords: A User password and a Master password. Most disks support a Master Password Revision Code, which can tell you if the Master password has been changed, or it it still the factory default. The revision code is word 92 in the IDENTIFY response. A value of 0xFFFE means the Master password is unchanged.

A disk can be locked in two modes: High security mode or Maximum security mode. Bit 8 in word 128 of the IDENTIFY response tell you which mode your disk is in: 0 = High, 1 = Maximum.

In High security mode, you can unlock the disk with either the user or master password, using the "SECURITY UNLOCK DEVICE" ATA command. There is an attempt limit, normally set to 5, after which you must power cycle or hard-reset the disk before you can attempt again.

In Maximum security mode, you cannot unlock the disk! The only way to get the disk back to a usable state is to issue the SECURITY ERASE PREPARE command, immediately followed by SECURITY ERASE UNIT. The SECURITY ERASE UNIT command requires the Master password and will completely erase all data on the disk. The operation is rather slow, expect half an hour or more for big disks. (Word 89 in the IDENTIFY response indicates how long the operation will take.)

of course since you cant detect the drives at all...
the above is sort of pointless

if I was guessing Id say its a power issue
check your house mains (especially proper ground),
use power conditioning or UPS w\ Power Conditiong and a good PSU
of course that begs the question of similar varianbles between yours and your brothers


thats all I can think of
sorry