strange hard drive situation

Just built an XP box but am having frequent problems with the WD hard
drive. Would take forever to detect (30-40 sec. and 75 sec to complete boot)
and about 1/3 of the cold boots would get disk failure errors which would
always be cured by soft re-booting, going into the BIOS (wouldn't even have
to do anything inside 'cause HDD always showed up), hitting F10 and exiting.
Thought maybe bad BIOS, but flashed to latest and no change. Ran
scandisk, chkdsk WD Data Lifeguard and all said HDD was fine. But then tried
a different HDD and problem went away completely, so I figured some kinda
problem (have no idea what though) with the HDD and that was the problem.
But here's the strange part - put the 'bad' HDD back in as primary
master, but if I attach ANY hard drive as a slave on the same cable (tried 3
different ones so far), the problem goes away entirely. Now the 'bad' HDD
boots up real fast (45 sec. vs. 75 sec.), auto detects almost immediately
and no more disk failures (over past 3 days & 15+ cold reboots).
What the heck's going on?
Gil
Theissen

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 13:43:09 GMT, "Gil Theissen"
<giltheissen.TakeThisOut@prod-a-gee.net> wrote:

 > Just built an XP box but am having frequent problems with the WD hard
 >drive. Would take forever to detect (30-40 sec. and 75 sec to complete boot)
 >and about 1/3 of the cold boots would get disk failure errors which would
 >always be cured by soft re-booting, going into the BIOS (wouldn't even have
 >to do anything inside 'cause HDD always showed up), hitting F10 and exiting.
 > Thought maybe bad BIOS, but flashed to latest and no change. Ran
 >scandisk, chkdsk WD Data Lifeguard and all said HDD was fine. But then tried
 >a different HDD and problem went away completely, so I figured some kinda
 >problem (have no idea what though) with the HDD and that was the problem.
 > But here's the strange part - put the 'bad' HDD back in as primary
 >master, but if I attach ANY hard drive as a slave on the same cable (tried 3
 >different ones so far), the problem goes away entirely. Now the 'bad' HDD
 >boots up real fast (45 sec. vs. 75 sec.), auto detects almost immediately
 >and no more disk failures (over past 3 days & 15+ cold reboots).
 > What the heck's going on?
 > Gil
 >Theissen
 >

Check your jumpers. Sounds like you have it jumpered as master. WD has a
seperate setting for "Single", ie master with no slave. The drive is
looking for a slave drive because of how it is jumpered. Common problem.

JT<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->