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[SOLVED] Compaq Armada E500 disk controller failure (cd drive)

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First post, by boby

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Hi all!

I got this Compaq Armada E500 (Intel 1 GHz, 256 MB RAM), for free, but without charger, HDD (and caddy). I have already ordered HDD caddy, but it will take some time to arrive. Charger I have also find and I managed to power on the machine, but there is some problem with it. It shows error like on the image bellow. When I remove the drive there is no error and I can boot from floppy disk. I have checked cd drive on some other PC and it works fine. Inspected the board and connector but can't see anything obvious. Cleaned all with IPA. I also update the BIOS but it didn't help. Now, I know that I have no HDD, but it should be able to boot from CD.

Am I missing anything?

Cheers!

Last edited by boby on 2025-02-13, 20:24. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 3, by weedeewee

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Just a guess.

The optical drive is a slave on the ide bus and the bios sees it as a fault that the master is missing.

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Reply 2 of 3, by boby

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weedeewee wrote on 2024-12-21, 16:06:

Just a guess.

The optical drive is a slave on the ide bus and the bios sees it as a fault that the master is missing.

hm...could be, but there is no way to change this

Reply 3 of 3, by boby

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So after I got caddy and installed it, everything is fine. No more error and cd boot works.
Very strange that it didn't wan't to without it. So for sure, was some master/slave issue.

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