Hi, folks.

I'm trying to put a second HDD onto the second IDE channel of a Dell 2400.

The CDR that's already there on "cable select" reports UDMA2 before
installation. When the HDD is installed as device 0, the CDR goes down to
PIO only and the HDD to UDMA2. If I disconnect the CDR the HDD works at its
proper UDMA5 setting. I've tried a different optical device, two 80-wire IDE
cables and all combinations of master/slave and cable select jumpers. The
result is the same - whenever there are two devices on the secondary IDE
channel, the HDD runs at UDMA2 and the optical drive at PIO only.

I've also put the second drive into another Dell (an 8300), which already
has two HDDs in it and a DVDR. In this machine the new HDD (in fact, all the
HDDs) are reporting UDMA5 and the DVD writer UDMA2.

At the moment, the only thing I can think of is that it's the BIOS or
mainboard-mounted IDE controller that's the problem. Does anyone have any
ideas what else it might be?

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 23:24:37 GMT, "G Hardy"
allegedly wrote:

At the moment, the only thing I can think of is that it's the BIOS or
mainboard-mounted IDE controller that's the problem. Does anyone have
any ideas what else it might be?

I had a similar issue, although not exactly the same. Turned out that in
my BIOS settings I had 'no device' or whatever selected for the secondary
slave, which meant that Windows would always drop the device into PIO.

Also in device settings for the IDE controllers there's something about
using DMA if possible. That's probably already set, but it's worth
checking.