Primary Slave drive "vanishes"

[UserXP]

Hello again, guys.
Today I have stumbled upon a very strange problem on an old computer. This is an older machine and it has 3 optical drives for playback purposes and one hard drive. They are all ATA drives, so this is the setup:

Primary Master: hard drive
Primary Slave: CD-ROM drive
Secondary Master: CD-RW drive
Secondary Slave: DVD-RW drive

Here is the problem.
Everything is connected properly and all the jumpers are correct. The trouble is with the CD-ROM drive. When PC is turned on, BIOS reports it but Windows does not see it. When I restart the computer and enter BIOS, it is also visible there. Then, if I insert an MS-DOS based USB flash drive which I have created to boot to DOS, the DOS driver loads and sets up all three optical drives and they all work normally, each and every boot. Then, if I restart the PC and let it load Windows, this CD-ROM is there again and also works flawlessly. It is as if I had to "refresh" its existance through DOS and then it would work. As long as the PC is on, every soft restart will remember the present CD-ROM status. If it works, it will continue to work and be visible after every soft restart. As soon as the PC is turned OFF and then ON, the "magic" starts again and only by DOS treatment will it be visible again (I have to repeat the procedure).

As you can see, hard disk and this CD-ROM share the same IDE cable, although the hard drive works perfectly. Nevertheless, I have replaced the IDE cable and there was no change, although the existing cable already looked like new (no visible damages). Neither Windows or BIOS report any error and the computer works without any problem with or without the CD-ROM reported. The drive is also working once it's been given an "incentive" via DOS session (I tried to access, read, play the CDs, all work). Is it possible that the Primary Slave part of the controller is malfunctioning?
BIOS always sees this drive and subsequentaly the DOS too, but Windows does not. And this state is only per existing "Power ON session". If I do not "refresh" the drive through DOS, no matter how many times the PC is restarted the CD-ROM will stay invisible in Windows even though BIOS sees it and displays it in the list of devices on every POST. But in order for it to start working in Windows again, it has to be "activated" via DOS driver.

Windows is XP SP3 and the CD-ROM drive is the legendary TEAC CD-540E. It does not require any driver, Windows uses its own (although the driver for DOS is an original TEAC driver)
The IDE cables are flat 80-wire cables.

Do you have any suggestions/ideas about what could this be? I have never seen this problem for a drive to magically disapear yet to be perfectly functional once it returns, with no error messages. Maybe Windows dows something wrong (where/what should I look for)?

[R_J]

Re: Primary Slave drive "vanishes"

check for and remove hidden drivers, at the command prompt type...
set devmgr_shownonpresent_devices=1 [hit enter]
type... start devmgmt.msc [hit enter]
In device manager, View, check Show Hidden Devices
check under dvd/cd-rom drives, IDE ata/atapi controllers and also under Disk drives
the device drivers greyed out are installed but not being used, sometimes they can cause problems, you can just uninstall them.
See if that helps.

[stj]

Re: Primary Slave drive "vanishes"

windows is shit.

also, the transfer rate of the harddrive is higher than the optical so winshit may be configuring the interface to match the primary and then losing the optical.

putting an optical on the same cable as a harddrive is bad practice because it will slow the harddrive transfer rate btw.

[goontron]

Re: Primary Slave drive "vanishes"

windows is shit.

also, the transfer rate of the harddrive is higher than the optical so winshit may be configuring the interface to match the primary and then losing the optical.

putting an optical on the same cable as a harddrive is bad practice because it will slow the harddrive transfer rate btw.

thats what i was about to post. get out of my head dammit!

[UserXP]

Re: Primary Slave drive "vanishes"

Guys, thanks for your help. Showing hidden devices did nothing (it was as if the drive physically weren't in the PC), although R_J's point did help me recall something similar that has happened before (so thanks, R_J).
Here is an update about this issue:

1) When the CD-ROM was showing up in Windows, I uninstalled it and then reinstalled it. It didn't help. It reinstalled it but after the first Shut Down it redisappeared again.

2) Then I again caused it to appear, uninstalled it via Device Manager and then I remembered when a few years ago my hard drive suddenly didn't want to use UDMA (again, only one drive in specific acted weirdly, while all the others worked fine, so it was kind of a simillar problem). I tried to recall the steps I took back then. I went to this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
There, I looked in all of the 4-digit subkeys (0001, 0002...) until I found one for Primary IDE Channel and one for Secondary IDE Channel. In Primary, there was 1 extra string (UserSlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed = 0). I deleted that one and all the others which had this "SlaveDevice" prefix in them).

3) I then restarted Windows, it loaded and "New hardware found..." message appeared. Windows then reinstalled the driver and TEAC CD-540E was again present, alive and kicking. Then I went to the Registry again to see what has been changed in the above mentioned key, and sure enough Windows added again these strings but placed different values in each of them (as if it clean installed them). From that moment on, CD-ROM appears as normal and works as it always did, after every boot and shut down. All drives use UDMA also. So, "problem solved" for now.

windows is shit.

also, the transfer rate of the harddrive is higher than the optical so winshit may be configuring the interface to match the primary and then losing the optical.

putting an optical on the same cable as a harddrive is bad practice because it will slow the harddrive transfer rate btw.

Although I don't know what could cause Windows to label a drive as physically non-visible on its own and why this particular one when there are two other present, or what has changed these settings for Primary/Secondary controller. And why now after so much time? It was its first instance of this, I think. I did not install any new hardware or software prior to this. I like XP and it serves the purpose on this older PC quite nicely.

Today I started the PC and the drive is here, exists and works. We shall now see whether it will stay there. If it works, maybe somebody else can find these information helpful.

[SteveNielsen]

Re: Primary Slave drive "vanishes"

putting an optical on the same cable as a harddrive is bad practice because it will slow the harddrive transfer rate btw.

Not entirely true, please read...

From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#IDE_and_ATA-1

Two devices on one cable—speed impact

There are many debates about how much a slow device can impact the performance of a faster device on the same cable. There is an effect, but the debate is confused by the blurring of two quite different causes, called here "Lowest speed" and "One operation at a time".
"Lowest speed"

It is a common misconception that, if two devices of different speed capabilities are on the same cable, both devices' data transfers will be constrained to the speed of the slower device.

For all modern ATA host adapters this is not true, as modern ATA host adapters support independent device timing. This allows each device on the cable to transfer data at its own best speed. Even with older adapters without independent timing, this effect applies only to the data transfer phase of a read or write operation. This is usually the shortest part of a complete read or write operation.[25]
"One operation at a time"

This is caused by the omission of both overlapped and queued feature sets from most parallel ATA products. Only one device on a cable can perform a read or write operation at one time, therefore a fast device on the same cable as a slow device under heavy use will find it has to wait for the slow device to complete its task first.

However, most modern devices will report write operations as complete once the data is stored in its onboard cache memory, before the data is written to the (slow) magnetic storage. This allows commands to be sent to the other device on the cable, reducing the impact of the "one operation at a time" limit.

The impact of this on a system's performance depends on the application. For example, when copying data from an optical drive to a hard drive (such as during software installation), this effect probably doesn't matter: Such jobs are necessarily limited by the speed of the optical drive no matter where it is. But if the hard drive in question is also expected to provide good throughput for other tasks at the same time, it probably should not be on the same cable as the optical drive.

[chozo4]

Re: Primary Slave drive "vanishes"

In case it helps over time there is a VB Script available that will reset the UDMA/PIO modes for you with a restart for convenience.

SRC: http://winhlp.com/node/10

I also attached the script for posterity. Simply remove the .txt portion of it and launch it as normal. If so inclined if the problem persists while this fixes it... could always remove the message box verification from the script so it automatically does the task for you and then link it as a part of a shutdown script.

Also, as Steve puts it that's correct. The speed loss is typically only when using a CD-Rom drive and Hard Drive at the same time on the same cable. Otherwise when not using the CD-Drive and only the hard drive there is no loss in speed overall. For me it was always standard practice to couple the least used drive with the hard drive[s].

[UserXP]

Re: Primary Slave drive "vanishes"


Thanks for the script, Chozo4, I'm sure it will come handy. I had the instruction and a precise registry key information saved in a TXT file and I refered to it to see whether that registry fix would make a change, but I had to do it all manually. This script will certanly be of use to me and all other members coming across a similar problem.

As for the speed impact, I can tell you that everything works well. The CD-ROM is used for the simpliest playback purposes only (videos, audio disks, document or presentation CDs), so no heavy load is there on it. It is a 40X CD-ROM drive and this thing was built to last. I bought it sometime in 2002 and it was in several PC setups through all this time yet it still works like a charm - which sometimes cannot be said for newer drives builds. Some that I came across were as if they had some sort of an expiration date after which they would simply stop performing well or altogether). This CD-ROM drive outlived two other CD-ROMs and two DVD-RAM drives (and it continues to do so).