Media Server Can't See It's Own Drives

[Robert Simandl]

Biostar mobo, P4 2.26gHz, 1 gb DDR333, XP Home OEM version on drive attached to mobo's primary IDE connector, two more drives attached to mobo's secondary IDE connector, RocketRaid454 RAID card with six drives in JBOD mode, two 400-watt power supplies.

Suddenly. the BIOS doesn't recognize ANY of the drives connected to the mobo's connectors, including the OS drive. Upon boot, it detects memory and TRIES to detect IDE drives but doesn't find any, then just sits there til I utter some curse words and shut it off.

All drives are in removable bays. All drives are showing power, but the ones attached directly to the mobo do NOT light their "activity" lights at all. The drives attached to the RAID card show power and activity fine and dandy.

Did my mobo's IDE controllers fry?

If worst comes to worst, I have another mobo sitting around unused at the moment. It's an FIC with Athlon 1.2gHz and 768mB PC133. Would this be enough to run an HD media server? This server doesn't do any recording, playback, editing, or encoding. It is used ONLY for storing media files and streaming them to the HTPC in my family room. The HTPC does the actual decoding/playback.

Thoughts appreciated, thanks!

[Robert Simandl]

Though nobody replied, I figured I'd post my results anyway. Someone else may have this same problem some time in the future...

Looks like the issue is the cheapie Genica removable drive bays...

When the C drive was connected directly to the mobo without being in the removable bay, the server had no problem booting up. When I put it back in a bay, server froze during the "detecting IDE drives" stage again. I put it into a different bay (and different tray in the bay) and connected the primary master IDE connector to it, still froze up.

Just for grins, I removed the C drive entirely and rebooted. No problem getting all the way to the loading OS stage (of course it stopped there because I'd removed the C drive).

I decided I'd try a newer, bigger C drive (and partition 30 gigs for the OS and the rest for more media storage). With a different, unformatted drive in the bay, the server locked up in the "detecting IDE drives" stage again.

So the problem is apparently with the bays (at least with two bays since I tried the C drive in two different bays). The C drive works fine with the same IDE cable without the bays. The bays are cheapies from Genica... could this be a case of getting what I paid for?

Rebuilding the server without removable bays is not an option, so I get the feeling I'll need to replace the bays. Probably replace all 11 of them to keep this from happening again soon.

Would y'all have any suggestions on what removable IDE bays to get? Kingwin? Icy Dock?

Thanks...

[Krispy Kritter]

I've only used a few in the past. Various brands, nothing comes to mind. Try a search on newegg and choose a brand/model with good recommendations. Better than blindly picking one.