IDE cable issue. Can't figure out

What's up everyone. This one has me confused a bit. I shutdown my computer before I left on vacation. I got back yesterday, booted up the computer, and this is what comes up.

When the BIOS is booting up, it shows the CDRW, two harddrives, and DVD drive in it's respectable master/slave configurations. (like it always does)

Then, it shows two lines that say:

Primary IDE Channel No 80 Conducter Cable Installed
Secondary IDE Channel No 80 Conducter Cable Installed

My BIOS sees the two harddrives and the two cdroms but WinXP will not boot up. The computer ends up rebooting after the BIOS screen goes to the WinXP boot screen and I'm back at the beginning of the BIOS again, watching my computer repeat this cycle. I just turned the power off and now typing at a friends house.

Keep in mind that the computer was working fine before I left on vacation and upon first bootup, I get that mess. Any help would be appreciated.

 

Do you have 8o pin wires?
Have you opened the case and took them out..and re-hooked them up?
Tried another set of wires?

 

Yes, I disconnected and hooked them back up. The trick is that the BIOS recognizes each IDE connector and identifies the cdrw, dvdrom, WD 120 gb, and my 40 gb harddrives. They show up in the BIOS bootup but then the message about the 80 conducter cable appears right afterwards. That is the confusing part because it prevents WinXP from booting up. Instead, I just got an instant reboot and the cycle repeats itself.

 

Umm I would replace the cable/cables first.
Second try each IDE device in a diffrent machine
third look at the possibuility that the IDE controler is going "Tango Uniform "

 

Lighthammer, while you were away on vacation did you leave your computer plugged in (I see you turned it off) to the power and/or the modem/dsl/cable modem connected as well? If so, and there were any storms in your vicinity it is possible that a lightning strike or power surge could have done some damage. Worth checking out ssmith10pn's suggestion re the IDE controller and other hardware devices.

 

Ok, I bought new IDE ribbons and I installed them. Same error message. So, I decided that "maybe" it might be the IDE controller in WinXP so I deleted the partition on the harddrive, created a new partition, and put in the WinXP cd for reinstall.

The WinXP cd boots up and when I get maybe 2 minutes into the process, an XP error message pops up. I rebooted and tried again a couple of times but got the same message. Here it is:

Stop: 0x0000007E (0xC0000005, 0xf77cd2d7, 0xf7c824ac, 0xf7c821ac)

Same error message 3 times at different parts of the install procedure. I never got beyond the format part of the setup process.

*I took out my DVDrom and now I only have Master harddrive, slave CDRW, and Secondary Master harddrive.*

**I have a AMD Athlon 1.7, 40gb hd, 120 gb hd, CDRW, 1024mb PC2700 DDR**

So, that's the point where I am at. It's not the IDE ribbons.

 

What motherboard are we dealing with here?

I ran into this issue and the culprit was a motherboard glitch that was fixed with a BIOS flash. I'm not necessarily suggesting this may be the exact same problem, but if we know the motherboard that gives a couple of other resources to explore.

Cheers,

ICE.

 

This may be worth reading through?

 

I just read the Microsoft Base Article and it pretty much says that it could be anything.

I just tried installing Win98se and I got an error message also but different numbers/letters, etc.

I have used this computer for over 2 years, reinstall every year with no problems and now it wants to do this. I'm not understanding it.

I'm going to take off all PCI devices and take off the second harddrive and see what happens from there.

 

flat battery perhaps?

best wishes, HJ

 

Western Digital drives can be very fussy about the jumper/drive arrangement, eg, jumpered as a single if it the only drive on the cable. They recommend a single/master/slave arrangement, but you may wish to try Cable Select if you still get errors (both drives on the cable need to be jumpered as CS).
http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/general/jumpers.asp


WD EIDE (Caviar) drives:
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/index.asp
See what the diagnostics say about your drives. If you use their setup utilities avoid installing EZ-Drive. If you happen to have EZ-Drive already that may be the problem and it needs to be reinstalled or if you can, remove it. Check both HDDs for Disk Managers/Drive Overlays like EZ-Drive. (Edit: be careful if there is a drive overlay on the second HDD, if you remove it or damage it you may lose the partition information. The HDD utilities should(?) include a sector 0 backup system.)

You may want to try installing Windows without the second HDD connected.

Like it says in the MS article remove any added hardware (PCI cards etc) when you are installing Windows.

If you still have problems, I would consider the BIOS upgrade, but try setting the BIOS to "defaults" first.

Matt

 

Ok, I think I figured out the problem. I took everything out and when I was looking at the IDE ribbon, I noticed that it was plugged into the IDE 2 slot instead of the IDE 1 slot. So, nothing was plugged into the IDE 1, only the second one.

I don't have time to reinstall WinXP right now to see if that was the case but I will keep you guys updated so there is closure to this topic.