Installing a PATA-100 Hard drive in Dimension 9150

Question

Hi, I'm experiencing a problem when it comes to using my 'old' 200GB Seagate ATA-100 harddrive to my new Dell. Dell's phone support said this would be possible if the computer came with only one optical drive, so that's what I ordered, leaving the other optical drive slot open for a parallel ATA harddisk.   So I've set the disk to 'cable connect' and installed it to the system. Both the new harddrive and DVD-drive show up in Windows now, but the computer becomes extremely laggy when reading/writing data to the harddrive. I've calculated that the computer reads from this drive at a maximum speed of about 1,5 megabytes/sec. This drive functioned fine in my old computer.   I should mention that the drive isn't recognised in Dell's BIOS configuration like for example the DVD drive. It's just shown as an empty slot... I've tried enabling the port to which the drive in connected in the BIOS. This just results in Windows neither being able to see the DVD drive nor the new harddrive!   Any ideas greatly appreciated... Edit: Noticed a bios setting: SATA Operation that can be changed to 'Raid Autodetect / ATA' instead of 'Raid Autodetect / AHCI'. Hmm.. Message Edited by ZrednaZ on 01-22-2006 10:26 AM

pericon · Answer

Hi,

Having exactly the same problem with a Seagate 120 GB. The performance drop is becasue DMA is not enabled for the HD so data transfers are driven by the CPU in PIO mode, which is extremelly slow and takes 100% CPU. Can even produce hangs in the system if you try to do another thing while moving data.

Spanish support suggested to flash the BIOS to the new A03 release. Haven't tried yet ... but no much hope. Could it be a problem with Seagate drives ?.

Kepp in touch if I find anything else.

ZrednaZ · Answer

thanks for the info.. keep me posted  :smileyhappy:

ZrednaZ · Answer

Solution found. The IDE harddrive MUST be set as Master and the DVD drive as Slave. No other combination seems to work, though the physical connection point to the cable doesn't seem to matter. Furthermore, activate both PATA ports in the BIOS. Both drives should now be properly detected in the BIOS and run in DMA mode in Windows.

gvpham · Answer

How to activate in Bios? Thanks.

pericon · Answer

Thanks ZrednaZ, I will try. I tried with the HD alone, but with the jumpers in the 'cable select' position with no success.

Storage, Drives & Media

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