computer hiccups

[miriam_e]

I was copying a number of my CDs recently, and became frustrated with how often I came up against buffer underrun. I finally found out that this was largely due to the fact that I had both my CD drives on the same IDE bus (never had this problem with SCSI). So I decided to move one to the other bus which currently had my 2 hard drives on it. That means I swapped cables between the slave hard drive and the slave CD drive.

A diagram might help (HD=hard drive; CD=CD drive)

My original layout:

bus1
HD (master)
HD (slave)

bus2
CD (master)
CD (slave)

My altered layout:

bus1
HD (master)
CD (slave)

bus2
CD (master)
HD (slave)

The change caused a weird problem. My machine now took about 20 minutes to boot. (At first I thought it was simply hanging on boot, but I left it for a while and was amazed to see it complete the startup.) There was another problem. My second hard drive appeared twice in the main My Computer list. I tried removing the spurious hard drive from the hardware list (My Computer, right-click, choose properties, Device Manager tab), but that didn't have any effect. I tried hand-editing the registry to remove the several spurious drive entries there, with no result. There was also another problem which I suspect was related but have no proof -- when encoding video files of a few hundred megabytes the computer would hang.

So I decided to try pulling out the slave hard drive, changing the jumpers to make it the master, and doing the same to the master CD drive to make it a slave.

My final layout:

bus1
HD (master)
CD (slave)

bus2
HD (master)
CD (slave)

When I reconnected the parts again and switched it on I was rewarded with a normal reboot and the drive appearing just once in the My Computer list. Yippee!!