[NTLUG:Discuss] Homemade machine locking up at swap

[Gregory A. Edwards]

gin wrote:
> 
> fgf
> Thanks for all who helped me. It turns out that it is NOT the drive. The
> drive worked fine on another system, and a good drive from another system
> did NOT work on the problem machine. Both were running in UDMA mode.
> 
> I swapped out the motherboard, and everything worked fine. But I also
> changed something else I that I thought might not have been a good idea: I
> had laid out the power cable to the motherboard under the drive. I was
> wondering if the power cable might have interfered with the IDE ribbon? I
> really don't know if the magnetic field from the power cable is significant
> enough to cause problems, but I decided to not take chances. I pulled it
> over to the other side of the chassis, well away from the drive and ribbon
> when I installed the new motherboard. So there were two variables I
> changed. I guess I will find out tomorrow which one it was (faulty
> motherboard or faulty builder) when I install the troublesome motherboard
> in another case.
> 
> Again, thank you all for your help!
> 

There are several issues that you need to be aware of with >8.4G and
UDMA66 drives.  First you MUST have a BIOS that supports extened INT 13
(IIRC) to be able to reach the disk beyond 8.4G.  It does not matter if
your OS will reach it if the BIOS can't.  Second is the matter of the
ribbon cable.  The pin/signal layout require a different cable.  If
either of these issues are not addressed all bets are off:)  And of
course your OS has to support big drives to make use of em as well. 
Linux seems to be real happy with a big UDMA66 drive (RH6.1) as far as I
can tell.

-- 
Greg Edwards
New Age Software, Inc.
http://www.nas-inet.com