[Ham-Computers] Sleep Mode problems and IDE woes cured! (long post)

[Philip Atchley]

Hello all
Well, I stayed up 'late' last night (2:00AM) and finally got all my
motherboard 'woes' cured!!

A little background for the benefit of others.  I 'tradionally' run two hard
drives here.  The main drive and a backup drive that is periodically
'cloned' from the main drive using PowerQuest's "Dive Copy".  This gives me
a fully bootable drive that is an exact sector for sector image of the
original.  If the main drive hiccups or I lose an important file (or
whatever) I can go to drive D and get it (Or just clone C off of D if the
backup was recent enough).

I've been running the original Win98 first edition since 1998.  Never had
ANY problem with the above on any machine I ran.

A few weeks back I got a new (for me) 600MHz P3 computer using a SuperMicro
P6DBS motherboard.  This is a SERVER designed Dual Processor (if you have
em) ATX motherboard with onboard dual IDE, Dual SCSI controllers, etc. etc.
The bios in this motherboard apparently behaves a 'little' differently than
most motherboards designed for consumer use.  It allows ANY and all drives
(including SCSI. IDE, Floppy and CD ROM) to be bootable, in order.  You can
specify the boot order for the first three boot devices and then select
"Make all devices bootable" after that.  Of course you can also "hide"
drives by disabling them in the bios.

When I first got this machine I ran it with one SCSI 4.8GB drive as the main
drive and had a 10GB Maxtor as IDE Primary Master as the 2nd HDD.  I had the
48x CD rom as Secondary master as the motherboard book suggested putting the
CD on it's own IDE port. I then loaded win98SE. This seemed to work fine as
I everything was functiuonal, EXCEPT that I had a yellow "!" that I could
not get rid of on the primary secondary port. (which I read could be
"normal" for some ATAPI CD drives.

THEN, a couple days ago I backed up C drive to drive D,  tried to load
windows XP-Pro, wanting to keep my Win98 and all my programs, mail etc on a
separate drive.  (I only had one drive plus the CD rom set bootable in
bios).  That's when everything hit the fan!!  XP still managed to load
itself onto BOTH drives trashing eaverything that I had so that no matter
which drive I booted from I ended up windows XP.  ALL my mail files were
gone and of course I could NOT access most of my older programs on either
drive!

The ONLY answer was to fdisk the drives clean and start from the very
beginning with a full clean Win98SE load, rebuild the computer programming
from scratch including all my radio logging programs etc.  Luckily I had the
forthought to back my mail folders, favorites and some other folders up to
zip disks a couple weeks or so back and I was able to retrieve my address
book from the "spare" computer that my wife is using for Juno email.  That
address bood is old enough that it only had one "mailman" address in it, the
rest being qth.net.

BUT, this wasn't the end of my woes.  After this was done, I COULD NOT get
my sleep mode to work, AND I had a yellow "!" on both the primary AND
secondary IDE ports as well as the USB drivers that I could not get rid of
(though I could use the USB scanner).  IF I reloaded Win98SE, and
immediately checked the device manager in the Control panel after first
boot-up everything would be fine AND I'd have sleep mode.  But after one or
two "boot-ups" the yellow "!" flags would be back and I'd have no sleep
mode.

I then removed the SCSI disk drive, put two Maxtor 10GB hdd's on the primary
IDE port (properly set for Master/slave) .  The USB flag would be gone BUT
I'd always get a primary IDE flag and "DOS Compatiblily mode" messages on
both drives.  AND, I still had NO sleep mode!

Then, last night I "hid" the 2nd IDE drive by disabling it in the bios.  It
is still there but not recognized by the Motherboard so that Win98SE doesn't
see it on bootup.  VOILA!  All problems are cleared up, I have NO flags AND
I have sleep mode again.

When I want to back up drive C to D using Drive Copy I can go in the bios
and enable the 2nd drive as the drives have to be cloned from DOS with a
bootable diskette anyway.

The only thing I can figure out is that even though I only had "one" drive
set as a boot device in the bios, some anomaly between this 'server'
motherboard and Win98 perhaps made windows try to boot from "both" drives or
something.  But ALL flags are cleared, all devices are active (except drive
"D" which is disabled right now) and THE BOOTS ARE EXTREMELY FAST compared
to what this machine ever did! (fastest booting machine I ever had)

THAT BRINGS UP ANOTHER POINT.  This motherboard has onboard SCSI ports and
as the machine arrived had a Seagate Ultra Wide high speed 10,000rpm  SCSI
4.3GB drive set as the primary boot drive.  But during bootup it took the
SCSI a VERY long time to come to life.  The slowest part of the entire boot
process was the motherboard setting up the SCSI bios, THEN it'd go out and
find the Seagate drive and things moved pretty quick after that.  WHY would
it take so long for a 600MHZ P3 to set up a SCSI bios in the motherboard?  I
have the onboard SCSI disabled now as I'm not using that drive.

73 de Phil  KO6BB





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