THE Hardware Thread

[ricmitch_uk]

Here's a quick hardware question, seeing as my campaign for a hardware forum has fallen flat on its face, I'm posting in Chit Chat.
Any, to the question: Can I run a UDMA100 HD on a Mobo which supports ATA66 as its highest mode?

Due to the lack of hardware forum, I've put a poll here. We never had 'em when I first campaigned. Continue your thoughts on this thread if you want.

If you're all anxious to see what I'm doing right now, and the reason I've been away, go here: www.clanbio.co.uk Let me know what you think by email, if you want. thx.

[chrisjk]

Well i've got a UDMA 66 HDD running on a mobo that only supports 33...it should just run at the max mobo speed.

[chrisjk]

BTW, your site...there's some dodgy going's on on the right menu...

[Ianpbaker]

to confirm chris's answer, yes you can run higher UDMA Drives on lower boards and visa versa.

[scoutt]

you could also get a promise UDMA card that plugs in to your PCI slot as well.

[ricmitch_uk]

Originally posted by chrisjk
BTW, your site...there's some dodgy going's on on the right menu...

I know. It's weird that. I originally put the <img> code straight after the nested table, and for some strange reason, it moved to the cell it was in. So teporarily I just slung a load of <br>s in until it looked right on my resolution (1026x768). If you change to that res it should look best.

[chrisjk]

Originally posted by scoutt
you could also get a promise UDMA card that plugs in to your PCI slot as well.

I've got one of those, they're good coz they free up an IDE device slot. Unfortunately they hog a PCI slot...

[filburt1]

If your mobo already has five PCI slots (I think mine has five or six), you really shouldn't be worried. I have the TV tuner, sound card, NIC, and something that I'm forgetting for some reason, and I still have several free.

If you get another drive, consider a more powerful power supply.

[ricmitch_uk]

Originally posted by scoutt
you could also get a promise UDMA card that plugs in to your PCI slot as well.

Nah. The guys who's asked me to build it has put me on a very strict budget of £500. Here's the spec I put together for him. (No I won't tell you where I get those prices, it's a trade secret)

• Item Name Cost
• Motherboard Gigabyte GA-7ZX £62.27
• Processor AMD Athlon K7 1000MHz 200FSB OEM £88.11
• Graphics Card Chaintech Video GeForce2 MX400 64MB AGP £78.71
• Hard Disk Fireball Ict 30.0GB UDMA 100 £72.85
• Floppy Disk Standard £9
• DVD/CD-ROM Second Hand (Whatever I can get my hands on) £20
• Memory Generic 128MB SDRAM PC133 £15.26
• Case Boring Beige ATX Mini Tower £20
• Moniter Relisys Moniter 15" TE555i £102.21
• Soundblasters Artis 4+1 Surround Speakers S-41W 20W RMS £31

Total cost: £499.41
Modem, Keyboard & Mouse not yet included. But the above prices are current, and I will be buying during the January Sales, so I should save enough cash for Keyboard, mouse & modem then.

[filburt1]

Including shipping and tax?

[ricmitch_uk]

Including tax. Shipping is free if I spend over £100 (which I obviously am).

[filburt1]

Wow, only 59 cents (or whatever the British use) short.

[scoutt]

what is the conversion rate for the dollar? it looks all greek to me. then again so does some of my programming

[chrisjk]

1.4 dollars to 1 british pound (penny or pence filburt)

[ricmitch_uk]

Originally posted by filburt1
Wow, only 59 cents (or whatever the British use) short.

Good aren't I?

[chrisjk]

modest too...

[filburt1]

Exchange rates:

http://www.oanda.com/converter/classic

or just go nuts and go here: http://directory.google.com/Top/Recr...es/Conversion/

[ricmitch_uk]

lol

[scoutt]

thanks chris

Ric, those aren't so great. I can get them at almost the same price, give or take $.50

like I can get the 128 pc133 for $19.88

but good job. I do think the UDMA drives are backwards compatible, so it should work just fine.

[Guv]

There are some excellent hardware forums elsewhere.

A hardware forum here would be second rate.

A lot of hardware questions are best answered via manufacturer sites. Others are handled very well by sites formatted very much like this site.

[filburt1]

What about Tom's Hardware?

[nabeels786]

and AnAndTech '


cheep prices: pricewatch

[filburt1]

Originally posted by nabeels786
cheep prices: pricewatch

...and little vendors with high shipping and bad return policies (in many cases)

[JungleMan]

Isn't it good to have a forum where you can chat about hardware with your friends?

[chrisjk]

It is great, but does anyone have the solution to this (it's quite a long story to set the scene...)

A DVD Rom on one of our machines was screwed up. It would periodically refuse to spin up discs put in, and would constantly say "Device unready" in Windows. Anyway, the nice man from Dell replaced the dodgy DVD drive with a new one (even though it was well out of warranty), and I slammed it in (not literally slammed). When the DVD did want to work prooerly, everything was fine. Anyway, after putting the new one in, it now won't recognise any device on the secondary ide channel (Zip drive and DVD). I've swapped the cables, buggered with the master/slave jumpers, and done all sorts of crap. I tried slaving the DVD to the HDD, and it worked..but that's no good because the cable isn't long enough, and I want it to be master of the secondary with the ZIP as the slave.

So...does anyone have any suggestions, bearing in mind it is not the cable, or the mobo port, or the DVD, or the ZIP, or the jumpers...ANY IDEAS??!?!!?!?! it's pissing me off damn it!

[filburt1]

It sounds screwy, but try making a non-hard drive device on the primary master. When my system wouldn't recognize several drives after a power surge, this did the trick (although I lost my 850 MB Seagate ).

[scoutt]

Originally posted by chrisjk

So...does anyone have any suggestions, bearing in mind it is not the cable, or the mobo port, or the DVD, or the ZIP, or the jumpers...ANY IDEAS??!?!!?!?! it's pissing me off damn it!

well if it isn't any of those tehn it had to be becasue you (slammed) it in

you say "it" as the computer or windows? when you first start the computer and can you see the bios start up and find everything, HD and CDrom. can you see the dvd being found there?

if you don't see if there then you have a bad DVD, maybe tha tis why he was so reluctant to replace the other one

[chrisjk]

The only thing that get's detected at POST is the HDD...nothing else, unless I move the DVD to primary slave of the HD, in which case the DVD works fine (so it's not the DVD drive). Also, I tried a different CDrom and it does the same thing.

It seems to me this machine was extremely attached to it's old dodgy DVD

Thanks anyways scoutt

[scoutt]

if you put the Zip on the secondary (by itself) does POST or windows see it?

[chrisjk]

Nope. I tried the zip in master and slave on primary and secondary, none of which worked

[scoutt]

well it sounds like the MB secondary ide port is gone.

[ricmitch_uk]

Boot into safe mode and see if you've got any devices in the hardware manager, that shouldn't be there eg. duplicates. These will only show up in safe mode.

[ShIzO]

i dont know if its true but, i overheard that when using ATA66/ATA100 PCI card you must change some settings in the registry because UDMA not default in windows.

MS Article

tell me what you think?!

[filburt1]

But does that mean you are replacing UDMA100 with UDMA66, or just moving up from DMA33 to UDMA66? I certainly hope and believe the former.

[chrisjk]

Originally posted by scoutt
well it sounds like the MB secondary ide port is gone.

I swaped the cables and the HD was recognised on the secondary ide, so not the mobo either

Boot into safe mode and see if you've got any devices in the hardware manager, that shouldn't be there eg. duplicates. These will only show up in safe mode.

They don't even get recognised by the BIOS

[G2k_Headhunter]

ok first on the hw for good prices (I'm not sure about international shipping) try www.tcwo.com and www.tigerdirect.com
Second on the DVD thing set the zip drive to master by itself on the primary channel don't even hook up the hd or dvd and see if the BIOS will recognize it if not then that's probably your problem get a new zip drive if that works then try hd=primary master zip=primary slave dvd=secondary master
if that works then try with zip on secondary if not try setting the zip drive to cs or cable select and try again if this doesn't work i need to know where the zip/dvd drives are not detecting in bios anymore
oh and yes you do have to enable udma support either for 66 or 100 you should have software that came with you motherboard or card that will do it

[chrisjk]

Sweet, thanks I'll try it later. Installing Win2k at the moment on another test machine (at last!!)

[ricmitch_uk]

Come on people! I can see you want this forum, by how the poll's going right now, but we need more votes, to sway the titans that are John, James, Karl & co.

[filburt1]

We don't talk about hardware that much to warrant a whole forum.

[scoutt]

Originally posted by filburt1
We don't talk about hardware that much to warrant a whole forum.

BUT, if we had a forum there would be more questions, get it