Mail Archives: opendos/2001/02/13/19:04:37
I have been following this thread but have not put my two cents worth
in. I was curious as to where this would lead.
First off, I would like to say this: IDE sucks.
Noe that I got that off my chest, I'll explain it. IDE is/was supposed
to be a standard. The problem is that no one follows the standard. they
take bits and peices that suit themselves and add other stuff to it.
Thus you have problems with drives working with one another. I good
prime example of this is using a ZIP or LS-120 drive with a CDROM drive.
Sometimes you have to play around with them and set the jumpers for
master and slave around to get them to work properly. Sometimes you
cannot get them to work together at all. A slow drive can affest a fast
drive. EIDE was supposed to have fixed all of this, yet it is still here
in full daylight with the same old problems.
Another example WD with their Caviar drives, used their own methods for
high speed which was not compatible with other manufactures drives, so
you might have problems getting various manufacures drives to work
together.
Early SCSI was the same way. but when they came out with SCSI-II
everyone started paying attention to the standards and we no longer have
those stupid problems with SCSI. I was not even aware that they started
making IDE CDROM drives. But I suppose that now with every modern
motherboard finally have a bus controller, they might work okay. SCSI
has always had busmastering. CDROM writes slow the system way way down
when they are burning a CD. However, I have recently seen some software
that claims to have eliminated this problem. (Maybe someone actually
wrote a program to use busmastering and DMA for burning CDs!!!!!)
So before I would blame it on NWCDEX, install MSCDEX and rem out NWCDEX,
then play with the drives until you can find a configuration that will
work. Personally I don't see why you would need to put it with the fast
hard drive. They are slow to begin with. I believe they only have 1mbs
maximum burn rate anyway. That is the same as a 2.88 floppy drive. I
know that you can use them through a USB port and not lose any speed and
that has a maximum of 1mbs or 1.5mbs for burning. For playback you could
lose some speed, depending on the playback speed of the drive. Since you
got an IDE drive, I am not aware of any IDE adapters for USB like there
is for SCSI.
You may wind up just having to remove the other CDROM drive. I have had
some terrible times getting ZIP and LS-120 drives to work on systems.
Eventually you usually can find a magic confuguration that will work.
If you do get it to work with MSCDEX, then try it with the same setup
and use NWCDEX and see if they still work. It may be purely a hardware
problem. Also make sure you don't have delayed writes set for any drives
that cannot use them. i.e. only the hard drive should use delayed
writes. This can also cause problems. In fact just turn off all delayed
writes until you get the drives all to work then try turning it back on
if you use it.
You may also have to check you CMOS setup and make sure everything there
is correct for each drive. Probably best to set them to auto at frist to
see if everything works right.
As far as I am concerned, IDE was a mess in the beginning and still is.
OTOH SCSI uses inteligent contorllers (except the real cheap ones and
SCSI-I controllers.) But I never had a problem with my SB-16 SCSI
controller and it was not intelligent, in fact it did not even have a
BIOS in it. I have a slow tape drive (although it is SCSI-II FAST) and a
Syquest drive which will not blow your socks off, and an old 3GB FH
SCSI-II FAST HD and a slow (4X) CDROM and they are all happy together. I
am getting a UW SCSI soon, should be sent today or tomorrow and use it
on the UW side of this controller and it's speed will not be affected by
the slower narrow SCSI drives.
Someone mentioned something about using the secondary controller for IDE
drives and the Primary for EIDE drives. As far as I know (unless you
have some really ancient MB or controller) both channels are EIDE and
all the newer board have busmastering. However, you do have to put in
the PIIX drivers to get the proper PCI bridge installed. This ancient
board I have does not have busmastering and it uses some kind of ISA to
PCI bridge that is dorky. Most 486 class machines did stupid things like
that. They did bass ackwards. Can't wait until I get that K6-III+ 450MHz
CPU in for the S1590 MB and torque it to 600MHz!
Pat
----- Original Message -----
From: "Utz Zarwell" <UtzZarwell AT compuserve DOT de>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 12:11 PM
Subject: Re: prob audio CD on 2nd CD-ROM with NWCDEX
> Robert W Moss schrieb:
> >Did you try swapping the drives or putting both
> >drives on second IDE connection?
>
> No I have not.
> Chances are too bad to get new information.
> First step is to ask if someone else ran into this problem.
>
> Regards,
> Utz
>
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