• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Getting the bugs out of ATAPI.

Chuck(G)

25k Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2007
Messages
44,491
Location
Pacific Northwest, USA
I was using a Socket 754 (ASUS K8V-X-SE) board with several OSes, but when I went to a SATA boot disk (old IDE 320GB drive went belly-up), I found that the BIOS support for disguising SATA as IDE wasn't present, so XP install, even with SP3, bombed with "I don't see any hard drives" error. I suppose that I could have looked for some XP SATA drivers and loaded them during installation, but, meh, I decided to switch to a slightly newer Socket 939 board instead.

So the only changed in the system was the motherboard; the peripherals stayed as-is. The replacement motherboard was an ASUS K8N-SLI. Here's the odd thing: I had the second IDE channel connected to a DVD drive as master and an STT4021A tape drive as slave. The 754 board running AMD64 Bullseye saw both ATAPI drives just fine; the 939 saw only the DVD drive, even though the BIOS POST saw the tape drive. Drove me nuts, wondering if I was leaving out some driver, but nope.

On a wild guess, I changed positions of the two drives--the DVD as slave and the tape as master. Bingo! Everything looks good.

And here I thought that SCSI had plenty of voodoo...
-----------------------------
For the uninitiated: I run these old boards because they have IDE and SATA and a floppy controller that handles single-density just fine. Speed isn't important, but I can run the most recent version of Linux just fine and use the 64 bit architecture.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top