VOGONS


First post, by charliegolf

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Hi
I recently got hold of an old Gateway 2000 486DX.
It came with what looked like windows 98 installed set to boot into freeDOS.
It has an IDE controller card (no onboard IDE), with a hard drive set to master and a CD drive set to slave and it all worked.
I wanted windows 3.11 so had to wipe the hard drive, I installed DOS 6.2 and then windows 3.11.
Now the IDE card seems to only see one drive. If only the HDD is connected everything is fine, as soon as I add in the CD drive I
get a message saying the OS is not detected and can't boot. The IDE card is a Datatech single port card and the HDD was on the
middle of the cable with the CD at the end.
I was wondering if anyone has any ideas or had seen this kind of thing before?

thanks

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Reply 1 of 5, by dionb

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How are the jumpers set on the devices? This is the sort of stuff you'd expect if the HDD is one of those irritating ones that has different settings for "Master with Slave" and "Single drive only" - or for that matter if both are set to "Master".

Reply 2 of 5, by charliegolf

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It feels like its not detecting the slave on the cd and replacing the HDD with the CD as master when it goes on the end of the cable giving the no OS found error. I didn't change the jumpers from when it was working but I did pull the hard drive out to check and it is set to master, the CD is definitely set to slave. I even swapped the CD drive out with another one in case there was something wrong with the slave jumper. Also tried things in different positions on the cable.

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Reply 3 of 5, by brostenen

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Did you install the CD drivers, when you installed Dos?

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Those cakes make you sick....

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Reply 4 of 5, by tpowell.ca

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charliegolf wrote:

It feels like its not detecting the slave on the cd and replacing the HDD with the CD as master when it goes on the end of the cable giving the no OS found error. I didn't change the jumpers from when it was working but I did pull the hard drive out to check and it is set to master, the CD is definitely set to slave. I even swapped the CD drive out with another one in case there was something wrong with the slave jumper. Also tried things in different positions on the cable.

Have you tried replacing the cable?
Is this a 40 or 80 conductor cable? Also, while this should not have an effect, have you tried reversing the orientation of the entire cable (swap motherboard and HD connection)?

Oh and finally, is there any disc in your CD-ROM? Again, this should not have an effect but maybe, just maybe you have a defective bootable CD...

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Reply 5 of 5, by charliegolf

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Thanks for the replies.
I have the OAKCDROM driver on there, I've tried it with the entries in the congig.sys and auto exec.bat and without.
I don't have the driver loading at the minute, would that stop the PC booting with a CD drive on the cable?

Last night I reversed the cable, it's a 40, and I have another one in coming in the mail to confirm if it's a cable issue and there is no CD in the drive when I'm booting.
When I was messing about last night I also noticed that that it seems to lose power when the IDE cable is connected, if the IDE is left out but the power cable is connected I can eject and close the drive tray, as soon as I connect the IDE cable, then I cant (on either of my 2 drives) which I though was a bit weird.
I've ordered a 2 port IDE card so I can try splitting the drive to separate cables to see if that makes any difference.

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