SCSI time 😉

Mabye both drives are failing? (Not likely but possible)

Have you tried doing the drive detect in the CMOS setup itself?
I hate leaving the hard drive selections to "auto" because it slows down boot time... so what I always do is do a one time drive detect in the BIOS and then statically setting it in the drive settings itself that way it always boots with the same settings and never detects on each boot up

Um, could you bring me up to speed on this one? Granted I can set the drive parameters to perhaps fix the symptom, but if Auto is being suddenly flaky shouldn't I be concerned that more is wrong?

I'm afraid I don't know how BIOS/CMOS works, so I'm seeing this as indicating a crumbling foundation. Is it actually sorta normal to have Auto on the fritz but the rest continue working?

>Mabye both drives are failing? (Not likely but possible)

Not likely. Both were tested before storage, and it's the same problem with both. But yup, I'll probably try a third or forth tomorrow if something more sensible doesn't come up.

Is there any chance this might have something to do with them being small old drives? I thought IDE backwards compatibility was pretty good down to around 10MB, but I don't actually know that.

FWIW, AwardMedallion BIOS v6.0 Revision 1003.A

What happens if you put both drives on the second IDE controller?

Btw, the battery is not depleted? It's been in storage for a while.

drives smaller than 80MB have issues with auto detect because they didn't comply to the ATA standard... they were IDE in the purest sense
for those drives, you must set the drive to any of the 46 profiles that are in the BIOS... if the profiles are not available, you will need to determine what the proper settings are and input them manually... if you tried to auto detect this old drives, the BIOS will detect the wrong settings and the hdd won't work properly

if you have a bigger drive, then use auto detect, but detect and hard set it into the BIOS that way boot up times are faster and less problematic

in older award BIOS (4.51 or older), you should have the "IDE HDD AUTO DETECTION" selection in the CMOS setup's main menu:

go into it and pick the appropriate addressing scheme for your drive... it will ask you per drive detected.... for anything smaller than 540MB, "normal" mode should be fine
once you go through that "wizard", it should automatically set your hard drives static in your "STANDARD CMOS SETUP" in which for each IDE controller/channel, it will display "user" with the drive parameters and not "auto"... anything not detected will be "none"

How embarrassing.

I didn't have these two old WD Caviar drives jumpered correctly for Solo.

6 pins, labeled MA, SL, CS. So like a git I presumed MA for Solo, because that's what I've gotten used to with my modern drives. But after looking it up online, Solo for these is no jumper. And despite being jumpered wrong, the BIOS struggled along and detected the drive correctly a little less often than half the boots.

Sorry, guys.

Glad you solved it!

Good old RTFM can strike at any time and experience level 🤣

Happens to everyone 🤣

I still recommend doing the one time detect in the CMOS setup so that it shows up as "user" in the drive settings instead of auto
having it detect on each bootup is inefficient and unnecessary

TheMAN wrote:

I still recommend doing the one time detect in the CMOS setup so that it shows up as "user" in the drive settings instead of auto
having it detect on each bootup is inefficient and unnecessary

^Agrees^.

I prefer the manual non-autodetect-on-every-bootup way any day 😉