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Dell Optiplex G1 - IDE2 Not Working
Hi,
I recently procured one of these older systems. It has a 3.5" floppy drive, a CD-ROM and a Western Digital IDE HDD. The CD-ROM drive makes a loud noise when spinning up, and the tray doesn't open. So I bought a new drive, set it to CS and connected it to IDE2 (where the original drive was). The BIOS doesn't detect it at all.
I swapped the connections over, putting the HDD on IDE2 and the CD-ROM drive on IDE1 and the BIOS detects the CD drive, but not the HDD.
Is it possible IDE2 is bad? I'm going to try using a dual ribbon cable and setting up a Master/Slave config off IDE1 to see if I can get both drives working, but I just wanted any feedback on this, maybe I'm missing something?
savvy2
4 Apprentice
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2547 Posts
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Posted November 29th, 2019 04:00
for a museum? 1998 PC G1 , are you going to run windows 95 in it? what?
w/ Pentium II or Pentium III microprocessor! wow, no? 768 MB max. RAM (bill gates loves this size )
IDE ended back in 2001. with the advent of SATA drives. (wiki)
the CD drive can be bad this old, most are, if the eject button works, eject any bad damaged disk or upside down disk inside, (labeled side up)
the all were very noisy new, (to my ears)
the BIOS only allows the DRIVE to boot, if at all that year, BIOS is not and OS and can not read files there.
but it will show up , as BOOT drive, if it can, but that 2nd CD drive is used too, and will be bad this old.
you are throwing used parts at this PC right?
the HDD is bad, no HDD this old is good. how can it.?
sure the ribbon cable way with CS logic works but not with any bad HDD or CD drive.
page 86 in the free manual covers drive select rules, no cost.
up to 4 IDE drives can be connected, same page, but do ,know for fact mixing to HDD not same, jumper rules on some drives are not the same also covered same page. why not just use both ports, and 1 drive each.
now why BIOS does not see drives, (cables plugged in right)
BIOS scans both drives, with ATA commands (set) and the CD drive will always report back of not 100% dead.
The HDD is a whole other matter, many HDD the electronics in the HDD can not report back if the disk sectors are dead. there is secret sector that stores the IDE, Identification, storage .
if the drive does not SPIN up the ID will be dead. if the autocalibration fails, at spin up , fails ID fails, and so on.
seen this vast times, not all drives work this way, but we assume that is true anytime the ID is dead.
For sure not spun up, (ears to casing) or hear it clicking like mad a and load, endless, (autocal fails) or power chip (hdd PCB) blow up, as was common then with power surges. a new HDD IDE> newegg has em.
good luck using G1. W10 will not run on this PC. period.(bare metal)
this PC will boot to CD. also in same manual, down load it and read it first, then see ALL THOSE VAST JUMPER there, a sea of jumpers, and they must be set right.
I say try a new drive. first. (or by 5 to 10 used drives 20 years old and 1 may play)