11 Jan 2003, 10:56, JIM HOLSONBACK (1:123/140), wrote to JEAN PARROT:

Hi JIM.

 JH> From this and your other posts to/from Matt, sounds like either 
 JH> the HDD has died, or perhaps the first IDE channel has died on the 
 JH> Mainboard.  I had that happen to me about a year ago on an Asus board 
 JH> with AMD k6-2.- HDD suddenly stopped working and wouldn't autodetect.  
 JH> I moved it to the secondary channel and it autodetected just fine and 
 JH> I could access the drive. Turned out the first IDE channel had just up 
 JH> and died, for no apparent reason.

Along this same line:  In recent months I have been installing Asus P4PE
boards in cases with front-panel USB ports.  These particular cases have
the USB ports pre-installed with a pigtail to be attached to the MB.  This
pigtail has two standard 4-wire USB motherboard pin connectors each with an
additional single 'flying' lead marked 'ground'.  The P4PE motherboard does
have the fifth pin, ID'd as 'ground' in the manual.

Like any good boy scout, I connected all the wires on the first batch of
systems.  Over the following weekend, my dealer found that the secondary
IDE channels were "dead" on all those systems.  After a LOT of
hassle, he discovered that when he disconnected that little 'flying' ground
lead, everything worked.

So far, neither of us can figure out _why_ this happens, we can only
speculate that some serious ground loop must be involved!

Strange critters!


     Good luck...  M.

--- Msged/386 TE 06 (pre)