From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on
>
>
> Well, considering that the error showed up with both an IDE and a SATA
> drive, it may have something to do with the motherboard's disk
> controller subsystem.
>
There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives. That's
what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all. Turn your disc unit
over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc controller
is. The motherboard contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge.

If there's a problem with a PCI-to-ATA bridge, it will by and large
affect both disc units (master and slave) on both channels (primary and
secondary) handled by the bridge. Device Manager, in "devices by
connection" view, will of course tell you which ATA devices are
connected to which ATA buses, and what the two devices that you saw
named in the error log have in common.

From: Arno on
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Well, considering that the error showed up with both an IDE and a SATA
>> drive, it may have something to do with the motherboard's disk
>> controller subsystem.
>>
> There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives. That's
> what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all. Turn your disc unit
> over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc controller
> is. The motherboard contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge.

There is a disk controller, it just has the form of a communications
controller, not a disk hardware controller. It still does things
like DMA transfer and PCI interfacing.

> If there's a problem with a PCI-to-ATA bridge,

Such a thing does not exist. PCI and ATA are fundamentally
different, hence there is a controller. With a classical ISA
bus on the mainboard, it would indeed only take some sort
of bridge.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: arno(a)wagner.name
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans
From: Rod Speed on
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote:

>> Well, considering that the error showed up with both an IDE and a SATA drive, it may have something to do with the
>> motherboard's disk controller subsystem.

> There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives.

Yes there is.

> That's what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all.

There is still a controller on the motherboard as well as that.

You can see that in the device manager.

> Turn your disc unit over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc controller is. The motherboard
> contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge.

Its rather more than just a bridge, particularly when its RAID capable.

> If there's a problem with a PCI-to-ATA bridge, it will by and large affect both disc units (master and slave) on both
> channels (primary and secondary) handled by the bridge.

There is no master and slave with SATA.

> Device Manager, in "devices by connection" view, will of course tell you which ATA devices are connected to which ATA
> buses,

There is no ATA bus with SATA.

> and what the two devices that you saw named in the error log have in common.


From: Yousuf Khan on
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote:
> There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives. That's
> what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all. Turn your disc unit
> over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc controller
> is. The motherboard contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge.

Yes, yes, we all know that, but disk controller is the colloquial term
for the bridge circuitry, despite the inaccuracy. And Windows itself
calls them controllers.

> If there's a problem with a PCI-to-ATA bridge, it will by and large
> affect both disc units (master and slave) on both channels (primary and
> secondary) handled by the bridge. Device Manager, in "devices by
> connection" view, will of course tell you which ATA devices are
> connected to which ATA buses, and what the two devices that you saw
> named in the error log have in common.

Okay, I just tried that. The system is organized into two "Standard dual
channel PCI IDE controllers" (I'm using them all in IDE compatibility
mode). Each "Standard dual" has two "ATA channels", which themselves
each hold 2 drives, meaning 4 drives per "Dual channel", or 8 possible
drives altogether. The hard drive that failed was on the first
dual-channel, and the two CDROMs are in the second dual-channel.

So in other words, no connection between them.

Yousuf Khan
From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on
>
>>
>> There is no disc controller on the motherboard with IDE drives.
>> That's what Integrated Drive Electronics means, after all. Turn your
>> disc unit over. See the chips and circuitry? That's where the disc
>> controller is. The motherboard contains merely a PCI-to-ATA bridge.
>>
> There is still a controller on the motherboard as well as that. You
> can see that in the device manager.
>
What one can see in Device Manager is always inferior to what one can
see with one's own two eyes physically on the disc unit itself, kiddo.

> There is no ATA bus with SATA.
>
A serial bus is still a bus, kiddo, and a serial ATA bus is still an ATA
bus.