In my experience, 68-pin to 80-pin converters can be a bit finicky. I've never had a drive actually beep at me, that's a new one in my book, but it sounds like the connection is a tad loose.

Do you have another system to try the configuration in? It could be some strange board incompatibility with your controller.

Run MHDD surface test to make sure the drive is fully functional.

Could it simply be a problem in early PCI implementation on your board? I can imagine that bus master problems could lead to similar behaviour.

What drives, how are they connected? Give some more details and post pictures of the hardware.

Also, this confuses me: "Moving cable from LVD to SE port". If your devices are LVD, then they must be connected to the LVD port. You also need LVD terminator(s) then. It's very important to understand that SE, HVD, and LVD can not be mixed in all ways (HVD is incompatible with SE&LVD; LVD and SE can be mixed, but should not).

The system used to work fine. The problems started after I swapped computer cases/power supplies. I thought maybe I damaged the drive somehow during the move, but I get this problem on multiple drives, multiple cards, multiple cables, multiple terminators. I'm thinking I'm either really unlucky and have multiple bad drives, or there's something wrong with the power supply. Thing is, this current power supply was powering a modern G3258 system before hand without any troubles.

Details: VS440FX board w/ Pentium Pro 200 512k, Adaptec 2940u2w w/ ultrawide cable connected to an SCA adapter, which connects to the drive (original was a 36GB Cheetah, replacement is a 9GB Compaq-labeled). The card also has a Pioneer slot-load DVD ROM drive connected via 50 pin cable. I have tried completely removing the optical drive from the bus to see if it made a difference. All the cables I tried have LVD/SE terminators on them.

In response to derSammler, these LVD drives can be connected to an SE bus. They just run in SE mode at 40MB/s instead of 80. But doing that didn't help as I get the same problems.

But I think the key point I left out was that all of this did work right, and worked right for a long time until I swapped cases/psu's.

P.S. It seems before I get the write errors/problems, I'll hear the drive spin down, then spin back up. I don't recall if it used to spin down like that when everything worked right. But if it's a power issue, it's a weird one because I've tried every molex on the PSU, different SCA adapters, different drives, and the drives only pull about 1A on each of the 5v and 12v rails.

Sounds like a power supply issue. Are you sure it gives the correct voltages under load?

Stojke wrote:

Sounds like a power supply issue. Are you sure it gives the correct voltages under load?

Not sure. I just know it worked with the G3258 system without any troubles.

I have two more drives arriving from eBay soon. I think I'll try them out and if I get the same problem, I'll try a different PSU.

A long time ago, we had a computer that would freeze randomly every now and then. It was an old Ambra worth a Cyrix 120MHz chip. When we hit the side of the computer, you would hear the drive spin back up, and everything would work normally.

It turned out that the MOLEX connector to the hard drive was loose, and hitting it would move the connector enough to power the drive.

Moral of the story is to check all of your connections. All the way through the circuit. Try different MOLEX connectors. It might work.

So, now it's working right. Not sure why. It just decided it wanted to work right.

Sounds like it was just a lose connection.

Ampera wrote:

Sounds like it was just a lose connection.

Don't know. I plugged and unplugged everything a number of times when I was trying different parts/cables. It still baffles me. But it works at least 😀