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General discussion

IDE Identification

Mar 31, 2004 7:09AM PST

rd400d77, can you help me determine how my second hard drive is identified?

First, your questions:
>>Compaq... hmmm... What model?
Prosignia 330 P550E April, 2000
>>Is this extra drive on an IDE ribbon in the PC or is this an external drive?
It is not an external drive. It is on the same ribbon with the factory hard drive.
>>Is it IDE-0 or IDE-1?
How do I determine that? Device Manager says I have a primary channel location 0 and a secondary channel location 1. The primary channel has a device 0 and a device 1, both autodetection DMA. The secondary channel also has a device 0 and a device 1. However device 0 is PIO only, while device 1 is DMA if available. But I don't see any mention of drive letter.
- Jack

I should mention that I simply took the new second drive out of the box and put the free ribbon cable plug into it. I did NOT change the factory jumper settings on either drive. On booting, I found I had an E: drive working fine. After that, I partitioned the new drive into E: and F: but I think that's beside the point. Right?

Bob Proffitt says:
>>Close to your issue is this example...

I agree with all you say, Bob, there are perfectly excellent reasons for keeping PCs dead simple. I'm not complaining about how Compaq and everybody else makes a BIOS. I'm just hoping this hardware forum might help me do better with what I can afford to buy, and so far it gives me considerable hope.

Discussion is locked

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Re:IDE Identification
Mar 31, 2004 11:38AM PST

Well on the Compaq site searhing for Prosignia 330 P550E brings up Compaq ProSignia 330 desktop PC 6350 thru PC 6750.

I picked one in tne middle and looked at the manuals a bit and it doesn't look like there should be anything strange there. Make sure that both hard drives are on device 0 and that you have an 80 conductor IDE cable and that both drives are jumpered to "cable select".

Yes, it looks like yours uses the F10 setup partition on the hard drive. I had to deal with some of that nonsense on some Compaq laptops I used to own.

Check this link:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SupportTaskIndex.jsp?locale=en_US&taskId=110&prodSeriesId=96447&prodTypeId=12454&supportTaskId=1852

There are a couple of "hard drive issues" mentioned there. The one "Computer Reports an Incorrect Drive Capacity or Receiving IntelliSafe 1790 Errors 2 Jan 2004 " is the one that I saw that mentions jumpers being wrong. Some drive jumpers not being set properly set to "cable Select" on some factory installed Fujitsu drives. Even if you're not getting this particular error it could prevent you from getting the new drive set properly.

You should be able to get Ultra ATA somehow I believe, but you should get all the latest system drivers while you're at the Compaq site anyway. You'll have to do the silly SoftPaq thing with floppies. I don't know if you already have the latest BIOS but it looks like there is a BIOS issue with some of the models with hard drives bigger than 64GB too.

Since it isn't the typical Award or Phoenix BIOS I don't know if you'll ever be able to change your boot drive now, you'll just have to update everthing, fix the jumpers if they are wrong and give it a try with the configuration partition. If this doesn't do it, I dunno... I'm about tapped out.

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Re:Re:IDE Identification
Mar 31, 2004 5:30PM PST

Hi, rd400d77 -

Hey, thanks a million for all your effort. Between you and others in this thread, I've got lots to chew on. I'll let you know if I get it booting.