ASRock mobo not properly recognizing my hardrive or optical

[clark1566]

I have a problem that has me stumped. I recently purchased an ASRock K7VM3 motherboard to fix my sister's computer. It is recognizing everything as it should except the IDE drives. When the hard drive and cdrom are properly jumpered to primary and secondary master the motherboard will only recognize them as slaves. The motherboard has American Megatrends bios version 1.30. I have verified that every component in the computer is good. The hard drive and cdrom both work fine in another machine. I can improperly jumper them and the motherboard will recognize them but will not boot past the post boot sequence. Any idea? Let me know if you need any other info and what info would help. I will try to get the required info from the rules for posting and post it shortly.

[cp]

set the pci latency timer in the bios to 64

[Denniss]

And/or jumper the drivers to cable-select (CS).
Maybe you have set Master/Slave jumper correctly but connected them to the wron cable position: Blue IDE cable connector belongs to motherboard IDe controller, black connector on the other end to the master drive, the grey connector between the other two is for the slave drive.

[cp]

oops, sorry, didn't read your post well enough. i thought that the drives were not recognized at all (silly me!). get the manual for the hdd and check the jumper position. they are sometimes a bit tricky to understand: either it's reading the label and setting the jumper you can't see or it's seeing the jumper and you're not able to read the label because it's upside down.
also make sure that the ide channels are set to AUTO or at least NOT to NONE.

denniss: it doesn't matter which drive is connected to which connector. it even doesn't matter which connector is plugged into the mainboard's connector..at least for simple things like the recognition process. things might look a bit different for ATA100/133 transfers as the cable length may have effects on the signal runtimes.

[KachiWachi]

cp -

@CS - I thought the IDE cable was wired in such a way that this will matter (pin 28 is cut).

See -> http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/ide-cable-select.html
See -> http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCS-c.html

[cp]

KachiWachi: IF you use CS you and Denniss are right. but i don't really see the point in using CS at all as there are two devices on one cable. so it shouldn't be that hard to configure them correctly. and as ide/ata doesn't define any hotplugable devices there's nothing that could go wrong in terms of device number interference.

[Denniss]

It is specified that the drives have to be used on their position on the cable to work properly. Using other connecors might work or not, depending on the devices attached and the IDE controller.
A behaviour like this to detect both as slave really sounds like cable or jumper problems.

[cp]

@Denniss: yes, i perfectly understand. but let's assume you want to connect a single drive that should be a slave and you're using CS. in order to get it working as a slave drive you'll have to connect it to the grey connector (blue is for motherboard, black is for master when using CS, talking 80-conductor-cable-colors) which leaves you with an illegal Y-wiring.

once and for all: wether you use CS or not, here is the ultimate connection guide!

Code: Select all

blue----------------grey-------black (80-conductor IDE cable)

- the blue connector goes ALWAYS to the mainboard
- if you're using ONE drive on the cable it MUST be connected to the black connector wether it's jumpered master, slave or CS. if it's jumpered CS it'll end up being detected master
- if you're using TWO drives on the cable it doesn't matter which drive is connected to which connector as long as they are jumpered one master and one slave or CS both. if you go for CS the drive connected to the grey connector will be slave and the drive connected to the black connector will be master.

i hope that's not too confusing ;)

[KachiWachi]

The OP may have a bad IDE cable.

Did you try replacing it?