# Harddrive and cdrom on the same IDE [SOLVED]

## realnick

When I have my other hdd on the same cabel as the cdrom the whole system hangs whenever I try to read/write to the hdd. Why is that? Bad IDE-cabel or what?

Maybe there is a way to disable some settings with hdparm to use it. I haven't had any problem with slackware, ubuntu or windows.

What should I do?Last edited by realnick on Sun Aug 07, 2005 2:04 am; edited 1 time in total

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## ikaro

set the cdrom drive  as slave.( usually there are some jumpers where you can set the device to master or slave )

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## realnick

I think the IDE cabel is the problem but still, why do I only have this problem with gentoo and not with any other dist?

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## ikaro

why I don't know - but it doesn't suprise me at all.

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## realnick

Ok, I know for sure that the cabel is the problem. But when I tried to change to a better one, gentoo wouldn't boot from the first drive. It said something like "no operating system" or whatever, even though I only changed the secondary cabel... weird.

And it still bothers me why only gentoo has these problems. 

And I mean come on, I can't be the only one having a shitty IDE cable. PLEASE

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## katsiki

When was the last time you attached the cable or booted off the hard drive?  Check how you attached the cable at both ends.  I once spazzed attaching an IDE cable to the motherboard shifted over by one row of pins.

Is this a new installation?  What is the configuration of your IDE devices (primary IDE: master/slave; secondary IDE: master/slave)?  Are the jumpers for each device set for master or slave, or are they both set for cable select (in which case, the hard drive must be at the end of the cable to be master)?  Does your BIOS detect master/slave correctly?

Are you dual booting?  Any chance you overwrote the MBR?

Check for typos in your grub configuration file.

```
cat /boot/grub/grub.conf
```

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## realnick

Primary IDE: One harddrive set as master.

Secondary IDE: One cdrom set as cable select, One harddrive set as cable select. (The harddrive is at the end of the cable)

BIOS detects everything correct.

Should I try to reinstall gentoo with the new cable and see if it works?

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## Maverick2k

if I where you, I would set the hardisk (Sec IDE) on master and the cdrom on Slave. Maybe that will work else you can put in the Live cd and check of both hd's will give the partion table right. The last step should be reinstalling gentoo, because if the problem is still there after reinstalling, all work that you did will be for nothing.

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## katsiki

I agree about trying the fixed master/slave config..  I've seen some motherboards being picky about working only fixed fixed master/slave, or else only working with cable select.

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## realnick

The BIOS won't detect my cdrom if I use master/slave. 

I have a barebone at the moment so I can't move around the cdrom and hdd very easily  :Smile: .

What bothers me most of all is that Gentoo is the ONLY distrobution that has this problem. I wouldn't be this bothered if I had the same problem with e.g slackware as well, cause then it would clearly be a hardware related problem.

edit: The partition tables are alright, as it works when I boot with the Ubuntu Livecd to copy stuff to and from the disk.

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## katsiki

Care to explain how you know the cable is bad?

Can you tell us what kind of motherboard and processor you're using?  Is your BIOS up to date?

Are you booting off the 2005.0 Universal Installation CDROM, or a kernel you built?  Maybe your motherboard may need a kernel built with IRQ routing for IDE, or maybe some other I/O configuration.

Working within slack or ubuntu, can you check which modules are loaded, or find the parameters which were used to build a kernel that recognizes the drives correctly?

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## katsiki

Realnick:

Take a look at this detailed article explaining about the special cable necessary for using cable select.  It was an eye-opener to me.  I've been mistaken about a few facts for many years.

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## realnick

I changed to a newer cable, so I consider this [SOLVED] then.

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