What would cause an internal HD to simply disappear in Windows?
in [Storage]
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From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on 24 Mar 2010 17:13 > > > Well, considering that the error showed up with both an IDE and a SATA > drive, it may have something to do with the motherboard's disk > controller subsystem. > There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives. That's what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all. Turn your disc unit over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc controller is. The motherboard contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge. If there's a problem with a PCI-to-ATA bridge, it will by and large affect both disc units (master and slave) on both channels (primary and secondary) handled by the bridge. Device Manager, in "devices by connection" view, will of course tell you which ATA devices are connected to which ATA buses, and what the two devices that you saw named in the error log have in common.
From: Arno on 24 Mar 2010 18:37 Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: >> >> >> Well, considering that the error showed up with both an IDE and a SATA >> drive, it may have something to do with the motherboard's disk >> controller subsystem. >> > There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives. That's > what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all. Turn your disc unit > over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc controller > is. The motherboard contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge. There is a disk controller, it just has the form of a communications controller, not a disk hardware controller. It still does things like DMA transfer and PCI interfacing. > If there's a problem with a PCI-to-ATA bridge, Such a thing does not exist. PCI and ATA are fundamentally different, hence there is a controller. With a classical ISA bus on the mainboard, it would indeed only take some sort of bridge. Arno -- Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: arno(a)wagner.name GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F ---- Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans
From: Rod Speed on 24 Mar 2010 19:02 Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote: >> Well, considering that the error showed up with both an IDE and a SATA drive, it may have something to do with the >> motherboard's disk controller subsystem. > There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives. Yes there is. > That's what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all. There is still a controller on the motherboard as well as that. You can see that in the device manager. > Turn your disc unit over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc controller is. The motherboard > contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge. Its rather more than just a bridge, particularly when its RAID capable. > If there's a problem with a PCI-to-ATA bridge, it will by and large affect both disc units (master and slave) on both > channels (primary and secondary) handled by the bridge. There is no master and slave with SATA. > Device Manager, in "devices by connection" view, will of course tell you which ATA devices are connected to which ATA > buses, There is no ATA bus with SATA. > and what the two devices that you saw named in the error log have in common.
From: Yousuf Khan on 25 Mar 2010 02:03 Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote: > There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives. That's > what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all. Turn your disc unit > over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc controller > is. The motherboard contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge. Yes, yes, we all know that, but disk controller is the colloquial term for the bridge circuitry, despite the inaccuracy. And Windows itself calls them controllers. > If there's a problem with a PCI-to-ATA bridge, it will by and large > affect both disc units (master and slave) on both channels (primary and > secondary) handled by the bridge. Device Manager, in "devices by > connection" view, will of course tell you which ATA devices are > connected to which ATA buses, and what the two devices that you saw > named in the error log have in common. Okay, I just tried that. The system is organized into two "Standard dual channel PCI IDE controllers" (I'm using them all in IDE compatibility mode). Each "Standard dual" has two "ATA channels", which themselves each hold 2 drives, meaning 4 drives per "Dual channel", or 8 possible drives altogether. The hard drive that failed was on the first dual-channel, and the two CDROMs are in the second dual-channel. So in other words, no connection between them. Yousuf Khan
From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on 26 Mar 2010 00:31
> >> >> There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives. >> That's what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all. Turn your >> disc unit over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc >> controller is. The motherboard contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge. >> > There is still a controller on the motherboard as well as that. You > can see that in the device manager. > What one can see in Device Manager is always inferior to what one can see with one's own two eyes physically on the disc unit itself, kiddo. > There is no ATA bus with SATA. > A serial bus is still a bus, kiddo, and a serial ATA bus is still an ATA bus. |