If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
Where are my optical drives?
On Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:31:40 -0400, mm
wrote: Where are my optical drives? The Dell Dimension 4700 with XP Home that I'm trying to refurbish has a DVD reader and a CD writer, made in 2004, but neither show up in Windows Explorer. Also with CMD, D: is not a valid drive. But the lights on both drives blink on and off like they should at system start up. First one, then the other, then iirc each one in turn again. I'm told this doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean Setup or the OS knows about them. I've wiggled the data connections, and I've removed the drives and they are both set to CS, cable select. I thought I read in something from Dell that one should be master and one slave but in the notes for this particular computer, it says CS for both. Looking in the BIOS, they aren't listed either, and I see no place to turn them on. Although there is a line in the boot sequence list that lists: internal or USB CD drives. When I tried to boot from Hiren's Boot Disk, it worked in neither interenal drive, but would work if I plugged into a USB port an adaptor made by Rosewill with a CD drive plugged into that. (When there is a USB drive plugged in, an entry for it appears in the boot sequence list that shows up when one presses F12 during booting, and it did with the external drive, but with just the two internal drives, no such line in the boot list.) When there is a USB CD drive plugged in, it also removes the label of "not present" from the line in the Dell setup boot sequence list that refers to "internal and USB CD drives", at least it removes it after first booting to windows and then going to setup next time. I tried another old CD drive that worked a couple days ago, and it blinks too, but doesn't show in windows Explorer. Might it be the flat data cable? A broken mobo? Anything else? I replaced the OEM data cable, which on this 7 year old machine has nothing indicating it's 80 conductor, with an old flat cable of my own, and put only one CD on it, which I jumpered as Master. This didn't help. I read Peter's post -- thank you Peter -- and followed the instructions at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982116 , and sure enough, the two "bad" keys referred to were just where it predicted they would be. Although I didn't delete the keys, just renamed them. Even though the computer did have Itunes, one of the devilish programs mentioned in the KB article, this didn't help. I downloaded to another computer the various Dell Drivers, burned them to a CD, and installed the Chipset one first. Then I went to install the utilities drivers, a large file which specifically referred to making the CD/DVD drives work. It wouldnt' install, and googling the message said the problem was the absence of autoexec.nt, a file I had never heard of in w\system32. I copied that from my own computer, and installed the utilities driver file, but that didn't help. Finally, I removed the CMOS battery and let it sit. When I started it up without a battery, Dell or XP gave me three warnings and sent me to Setup, but I continued to XP and ran Windows Explorer. And the CD drive was there. TADA! I restarted and this time, it went to XP without stopping, so I had to interrupt and go to Setup, and in the list of drives there were the same 5, Floppy, SATA1, SATA2, PATA1, PATA2. The difference was that PATA1 and 2 were listed as CD Master and CD Slave, when before, I don't remember but it was less informative, maybe blank (though I didn't realize what fields shouldn't have been blank). But those two lines, PATA1 and 2, though mostly blank, were ON all this time that the drives didn't work. ON is the default. PATA1 also listed the CD drive model number. A very good sign. :-) I turned it off and put the battery back in, set the time in Setup. I haven't connected the original CD-writer and DVD-reader yet, but I'm pretty sure they'll both work, and if they don't, I know how to reset things now. It might also have been enough to go to Maintnenance/Reset to Defaults in the Dell Setup screen. ??? Maybe it would have been enough to turn the drives OFF, then turn them ON again. ??? So the last problem with this machine is solved. (The elapsed time was a lot, but the total time taken wasn't so much.) (Coincidentally, there is a new problem, but I don't much care. It started running like molasses last night (really. 5 minutes to bring up Windows Explorer!), after I installed FF4 and redid the IE connection setttings, fwiw, but I don't care because I'm going to remove the HDD, copy the email etc. from it to a CD for the friend (who gave this to me) and her daughter, and put in more memory and bigger HDDs.) P&M&M&M because this is an old thread in the XP group and I don't want you to miss it. Although BD and Paul, no email copies for you. |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
Where are my optical drives?
mm wrote:
On Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:31:40 -0400, mm wrote: Where are my optical drives? The Dell Dimension 4700 with XP Home that I'm trying to refurbish has a DVD reader and a CD writer, made in 2004, but neither show up in Windows Explorer. Also with CMD, D: is not a valid drive. But the lights on both drives blink on and off like they should at system start up. First one, then the other, then iirc each one in turn again. I'm told this doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean Setup or the OS knows about them. I've wiggled the data connections, and I've removed the drives and they are both set to CS, cable select. I thought I read in something from Dell that one should be master and one slave but in the notes for this particular computer, it says CS for both. Looking in the BIOS, they aren't listed either, and I see no place to turn them on. Although there is a line in the boot sequence list that lists: internal or USB CD drives. When I tried to boot from Hiren's Boot Disk, it worked in neither interenal drive, but would work if I plugged into a USB port an adaptor made by Rosewill with a CD drive plugged into that. (When there is a USB drive plugged in, an entry for it appears in the boot sequence list that shows up when one presses F12 during booting, and it did with the external drive, but with just the two internal drives, no such line in the boot list.) When there is a USB CD drive plugged in, it also removes the label of "not present" from the line in the Dell setup boot sequence list that refers to "internal and USB CD drives", at least it removes it after first booting to windows and then going to setup next time. I tried another old CD drive that worked a couple days ago, and it blinks too, but doesn't show in windows Explorer. Might it be the flat data cable? A broken mobo? Anything else? I replaced the OEM data cable, which on this 7 year old machine has nothing indicating it's 80 conductor, with an old flat cable of my own, and put only one CD on it, which I jumpered as Master. This didn't help. I read Peter's post -- thank you Peter -- and followed the instructions at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982116 , and sure enough, the two "bad" keys referred to were just where it predicted they would be. Although I didn't delete the keys, just renamed them. Even though the computer did have Itunes, one of the devilish programs mentioned in the KB article, this didn't help. I downloaded to another computer the various Dell Drivers, burned them to a CD, and installed the Chipset one first. Then I went to install the utilities drivers, a large file which specifically referred to making the CD/DVD drives work. It wouldnt' install, and googling the message said the problem was the absence of autoexec.nt, a file I had never heard of in w\system32. I copied that from my own computer, and installed the utilities driver file, but that didn't help. Finally, I removed the CMOS battery and let it sit. When I started it up without a battery, Dell or XP gave me three warnings and sent me to Setup, but I continued to XP and ran Windows Explorer. And the CD drive was there. TADA! I restarted and this time, it went to XP without stopping, so I had to interrupt and go to Setup, and in the list of drives there were the same 5, Floppy, SATA1, SATA2, PATA1, PATA2. The difference was that PATA1 and 2 were listed as CD Master and CD Slave, when before, I don't remember but it was less informative, maybe blank (though I didn't realize what fields shouldn't have been blank). But those two lines, PATA1 and 2, though mostly blank, were ON all this time that the drives didn't work. ON is the default. PATA1 also listed the CD drive model number. A very good sign. :-) I turned it off and put the battery back in, set the time in Setup. I haven't connected the original CD-writer and DVD-reader yet, but I'm pretty sure they'll both work, and if they don't, I know how to reset things now. It might also have been enough to go to Maintnenance/Reset to Defaults in the Dell Setup screen. ??? Maybe it would have been enough to turn the drives OFF, then turn them ON again. ??? So the last problem with this machine is solved. (The elapsed time was a lot, but the total time taken wasn't so much.) (Coincidentally, there is a new problem, but I don't much care. It started running like molasses last night (really. 5 minutes to bring up Windows Explorer!), after I installed FF4 and redid the IE connection setttings, fwiw, but I don't care because I'm going to remove the HDD, copy the email etc. from it to a CD for the friend (who gave this to me) and her daughter, and put in more memory and bigger HDDs.) P&M&M&M because this is an old thread in the XP group and I don't want you to miss it. Although BD and Paul, no email copies for you. I would think the "CMOS clearing" from removing the battery, is what eventually did it. But when you retest with the optical drives in place again, you'll know for sure. On a retail motherboard, you'd be able to enter the BIOS "drives" page and see identification information. That consists of a text string which is read from a drive (optical or HDD), and is a basic test of communications on the IDE or SATA cable. If you can't get that string to appear, then there are several possible reasons, but one of them seems to be garbage in the CMOS. The CMOS is 256 bytes of memory in the Southbridge, which is "battery backed" by the CMOS coin cell. A number of the lower memory locations in there, are standardized. You can find a web page with definitions of what those locations control. The upper part of the CMOS is undocumented, and can contain virtually anything. Apparently, even software running on the computer, can get in there and mess around. As a consequence, there is a remote possibility, that two things will use the same location in the CMOS at the same time, with weird results. The lower part of the CMOS (when you find that web page with the definitions) is protected by two checksums. One checksum protects the password area, while the other checksum protects the remaining bytes. That would lead to a "checksum error", in the event of corruption of lower locations. But for any of the rest of the CMOS (where I don't know if any standards or defacto standards exist), just about anything could happen. ******* When things are more back to normal, if you're still experiencing "molasses", the next thing I'd check is whether the system claims to be in PIO or DMA mode. PIO or polled I/O mode, results in slow 4 to 7MB/sec transfer rates to or from the hard drive. That can result in a perceived slowness (because the CPU is pretty busy transferring data, a piece at a time). Checking with the free version of HDTune (benchmark test) is a quick way to detect PIO. On a "normal" HDD, the HDTune benchmark is a curve, while in PIO mode the result is a flat line at 4MB/sec. The computer also has things like "SpeedStep", which is the ability to slow the CPU clock when the system is idle. But I doubt that would give you the molasses effect. There was an incident with some Dell products, that became known as "ThrottleGate". I can't find any copies of the nice document provided by "Tinkerdude", which is an excellent review of techniques for checking hardware operating speed. So this would be an example of a way to slow a machine to a crawl, by abusing the facilities offered by the hardware. As far as I know, there are only a few models that are affected by this. http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/01/d...ents/23634969/ Paul |
#3
|
|||
|
|||
Where are my optical drives?
On Sun, 01 May 2011 22:53:52 -0400, Paul wrote:
I would think the "CMOS clearing" from removing the battery, is what eventually did it. But when you retest with the optical drives in place again, you'll know for sure. That won't be for a few weeks. Nope, I did it tonight, and it finds both CDs, and even tried to boot from one of them. I forget to try connecting them as CS, however, as they were when I got the computer. When CS works, is it better, the same, or not as good as Master/Slave? Thanks a lot for what efollows. Again I wanted to reply without without waiting utnil I finished absorbing all this and the link. On a retail motherboard, you'd be able to enter the BIOS "drives" page and see identification information. That consists of a text string which is read from a drive (optical or HDD), and is a basic test of communications on the IDE or SATA cable. If you can't get that string to appear, then there are several possible reasons, but one of them seems to be garbage in the CMOS. The CMOS is 256 bytes of memory in the Southbridge, which is "battery backed" by the CMOS coin cell. A number of the lower memory locations in there, are standardized. You can find a web page with definitions of what those locations control. The upper part of the CMOS is undocumented, and can contain virtually anything. Apparently, even software running on the computer, can get in there and mess around. As a consequence, there is a remote possibility, that two things will use the same location in the CMOS at the same time, with weird results. The lower part of the CMOS (when you find that web page with the definitions) is protected by two checksums. One checksum protects the password area, while the other checksum protects the remaining bytes. That would lead to a "checksum error", in the event of corruption of lower locations. But for any of the rest of the CMOS (where I don't know if any standards or defacto standards exist), just about anything could happen. ******* When things are more back to normal, if you're still experiencing "molasses", the next thing I'd check is whether the system claims to be in PIO or DMA mode. PIO or polled I/O mode, results in slow 4 to 7MB/sec transfer rates to or from the hard drive. That can result in a perceived slowness (because the CPU is pretty busy transferring data, a piece at a time). Checking with the free version of HDTune (benchmark test) is a quick way to detect PIO. On a "normal" HDD, the HDTune benchmark is a curve, while in PIO mode the result is a flat line at 4MB/sec. The computer also has things like "SpeedStep", which is the ability to slow the CPU clock when the system is idle. But I doubt that would give you the molasses effect. There was an incident with some Dell products, that became known as "ThrottleGate". I can't find any copies of the nice document provided by "Tinkerdude", which is an excellent review of techniques for checking hardware operating speed. So this would be an example of a way to slow a machine to a crawl, by abusing the facilities offered by the hardware. As far as I know, there are only a few models that are affected by this. http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/01/d...ents/23634969/ Paul |
#4
|
|||
|
|||
Where are my optical drives?
On May 4, 11:23*pm, mm wrote:
When CS works, is it better, the same, or not as good as Master/Slave? The same FWIH. |
#5
|
|||
|
|||
Where are my optical drives?
On May 5, 6:35*am, Bob Villa wrote:
On May 4, 11:23*pm, mm wrote: When CS works, is it better, the same, or not as good as Master/Slave? The same FWIH. Not exactly. The industry could not come up with a single standard for IDE drive cabling, so it did TWO. Master-Slave originally required a cable that has continuous wire leads from one end to the other. One can jumper either drive as master or as slave, but the two drives cannot both be jumpered the same way. If one of the drives is jumpered as CS, good luck. Cable Select requires a cable with one wire lead cut through. With a cable select cable, both drives are typically jumpered as cable select, and the motherboard IDE hardware logic figures out which one is master and which is slave. With the typical cable select cable, the drive at the other end of the cable from the motherboard is master, and the drive in the middle is slave. One can use master-slave jumper settings with a cable select cable as the settings duplicate the master and slave positions on the cable. Dell used only cable select type cables for at least the last 12 or 13 years, so all this discussion is academic. With a Dell system, use CS settings for both drives and you can hardly go wrong. The only time CS will not work with a Dell is when somebody has snuck a master-slave cable into the mix. The major manufacturers almost invariably use cable-select because it makes the assembly of a computer at the factory just a little more mindless and foolproof. I still cannot understand why master-slave cabling ever saw the light of day... Ben Myers |
#6
|
|||
|
|||
Where are my optical drives?
On May 5, 8:55*am, Ben Myers wrote:
On May 5, 6:35*am, Bob Villa wrote: On May 4, 11:23*pm, mm wrote: When CS works, is it better, the same, or not as good as Master/Slave? The same FWIH. Not exactly. *The industry could not come up with a single standard for IDE drive cabling, so it did TWO. Master-Slave originally required a cable that has continuous wire leads from one end to the other. *One can jumper either drive as master or as slave, but the two drives cannot both be jumpered the same way. *If one of the drives is jumpered as CS, good luck. Cable Select requires a cable with one wire lead cut through. *With a cable select cable, both drives are typically jumpered as cable select, and the motherboard IDE hardware logic figures out which one is master and which is slave. *With the typical cable select cable, the drive at the other end of the cable from the motherboard is master, and the drive in the middle is slave. One can use master-slave jumper settings with a cable select cable as the settings duplicate the master and slave positions on the cable. Dell used only cable select type cables for at least the last 12 or 13 years, so all this discussion is academic. *With a Dell system, use CS settings for both drives and you can hardly go wrong. *The only time CS will not work with a Dell is when somebody has snuck a master-slave cable into the mix. The major manufacturers almost invariably use cable-select because it makes the assembly of a computer at the factory just a little more mindless and foolproof. *I still cannot understand why master-slave cabling ever saw the light of day... Ben Myers The question was, "If it works, is it better, the same, etc...". Key phrase being, "If it works". But thanks for the clarification. |
#7
|
|||
|
|||
Where are my optical drives?
On Thu, 5 May 2011 06:55:23 -0700 (PDT), Ben Myers
wrote: On May 5, 6:35*am, Bob Villa wrote: On May 4, 11:23*pm, mm wrote: When CS works, is it better, the same, or not as good as Master/Slave? The same FWIH. Not exactly. The industry could not come up with a single standard for IDE drive cabling, so it did TWO. Master-Slave originally required a cable that has continuous wire leads from one end to the other. One can jumper either drive as master or as slave, but the two drives cannot both be jumpered the same way. If one of the drives is jumpered as CS, good luck. Cable Select requires a cable with one wire lead cut through. With a cable select cable, both drives are typically jumpered as cable select, and the motherboard IDE hardware logic figures out which one is master and which is slave. With the typical cable select cable, the drive at the other end of the cable from the motherboard is master, and the drive in the middle is slave. One can use master-slave jumper settings with a cable select cable as the settings duplicate the master and slave positions on the cable. Dell used only cable select type cables for at least the last 12 or 13 years, so all this discussion is academic. With a Dell system, use CS settings for both drives and you can hardly go wrong. The only time CS will not work with a Dell is when somebody has snuck a master-slave cable into the mix. The major manufacturers almost invariably use cable-select because it makes the assembly of a computer at the factory just a little more mindless and foolproof. I still cannot understand why master-slave cabling ever saw the light of day... Ben Myers As far as I recall, I can't say one worked better than the other but my experience is limited. I seem to recall the older dells had the master/slave and the newer ones were cable select???? Feel free to correct me as I don't really open my cases that often .... a good sign I think g. |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Do optical drives really need fans? | Király | Storage (alternative) | 5 | September 2nd 10 08:39 PM |
Why two optical drives? | Cyrius7 | Dell Computers | 5 | February 15th 05 02:43 AM |
SP2 and Optical Drives | Max | Homebuilt PC's | 3 | January 6th 05 11:02 PM |
Two optical drives? | David Pendleton | Compaq Servers | 1 | August 13th 04 02:24 AM |
What are the reasons for having 2 optical drives? | Flor | Homebuilt PC's | 4 | September 21st 03 03:31 AM |