«

I have a friend who has a Dell Dimension PC.
He had added a second hard drive to the system - an ATA100 IDE drive.
Windows recognized it fine, and was able to store data on it. However,
when he tried to either transfer a very large file, such as over a
Gigabyte, or if he tried to double-click on a movie file to play
within Media Player, everything slowed down. The file would hang, if
being copied it would just have floating folders, etc. The movie would
just freeze up Media Player. Nothing happened like this with files on
the primary HDD.

We changed HDD and still the same problems occured.

Then we discovered that in the system BIOS - that HDD was not even
being detected because that IDE channel was set to "Nothing"

After changing it to Auto, and rebooting, everything worked great.

So how could Windows have been detecting and using the drive if the
system's BIOS didn't? And how is it that this problem occured? Was
Windows just detecting it in some fundamental way but not correctly
recognizing the Sectors/Blocks etc? The drive architecture?

It is just strange that's all. Now everything is fine but I haven't
seen Windows machine recognize a drive that was disabled in the BIOS.

Windows XP Pro, by the way.


---Atreju---

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:38:19 GMT, Atreju <>
wrote:


|> an ATA100 IDE drive.
|> Windows recognized it fine, and was able to store data on it. However,
|> when he tried to either transfer a very large file, such as over a
|> Gigabyte, or if he tried to double-click on a movie file to play
|> within Media Player, everything slowed down.
|>
|>
|> Then we discovered that in the system BIOS - that HDD was not even
|> being detected because that IDE channel was set to "Nothing"
|>
|> After changing it to Auto, and rebooting, everything worked great.
|>
|> So how could Windows have been detecting and using the drive if the
|> system's BIOS didn't? And how is it that this problem occured?

You had a software interface and not a hardware one, and why it was so
slow.

When USB support was added to Windows, Some NT systems couldn't get it
to work unless they disabled it in the bios and then let the operating
system control it.

|> Was
|> Windows just detecting it in some fundamental way but not correctly
|> recognizing the Sectors/Blocks etc? The drive architecture?

Windows just has to query the drive, the drive will tell it everything
it needs to know.

|> It is just strange that's all. Now everything is fine but I haven't
|> seen Windows machine recognize a drive that was disabled in the BIOS.

You sure?


--

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 15:30:54 GMT, wrote:

>
>|> It is just strange that's all. Now everything is fine but I haven't
>|> seen Windows machine recognize a drive that was disabled in the BIOS.
>
>You sure?

To the best of my recollection (and I have very good recollection)
I've never seen that. It could be just that Windows XP does it moreso
than older OSs. I don't know. Perhaps because I'm smart enough to
always setup the BIOS immediately after installing new hardware!


---Atreju---

Atreju wrote:
>
> Then we discovered that in the system BIOS - that HDD was not even
> being detected because that IDE channel was set to "Nothing"
>
> So how could Windows have been detecting and using the drive if the
> system's BIOS didn't? And how is it that this problem occured? Was

Same way windows sees your cdrom drives if they are set to NONE in the
bios. NT has had this feature for years.




--
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