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Smart, eh? I was frustrated and in a rush, so I accidentally pushed the IDE cable into my HDD too card... upside down. It didn't make a clean break, some was still left on the HDD (maybe 40%), so I decided to put some aluminum foil in the hole of the IDE connector for the broken pin.
Everything booted up. However, I had just finished doing a bunch of other stuff, so it wasn't until now, after some testing, that I figured out it was the IDE hard drive causing a MASSIVE slowdown of my computer -- took 2 minutes, 27.5 seconds to boot! The drive works, reading and writing to it is fine, it just makes my PC slow:
Anyhow, I unhooked the drive and speed was back to normal. I did some checking, looks like the DMARQ pin is the one that broke. Luckily, it isn't a mandatory pin; but I would still like the drive to work fine again.
I'm wondering, if I disable DMA on the drive, will that allow it to work properly again? It should no longer want to access the broken pin. Second, is the pin fixable? Did I make the right decision putting aluminum in the hole?
Help!
Edit: Upon closer inspection, it looks like the pin was pushed in, not broken. Unfortunately, I don't have any pliers small enough to pull it back up, and tweezers don't have enough grip. I'll have to make a trip to the hardware store. However, I disabled DMA on my IDE channels in the BIOS, and the computer is chugging along perfectly fine for now; must have knocked off 45 seconds of boot time. The good thing is I only use this drive for storage (music, movies, etc.), so anything beyond 60 Mbps is unnecessary. Even PIO Mode 2 provides 8 MBps of bandwidth, just enough if I take into account overhead.
Everything booted up. However, I had just finished doing a bunch of other stuff, so it wasn't until now, after some testing, that I figured out it was the IDE hard drive causing a MASSIVE slowdown of my computer -- took 2 minutes, 27.5 seconds to boot! The drive works, reading and writing to it is fine, it just makes my PC slow:
15.0s at POST
20.6s black screen before XP logo
2.4s at "loading bar" before XP logo
22.4s at XP logo loading
11.0s black screen after logo, before blue "Logging in" screen
35.2s logging into your account
55.9s to load all startup applications
20.6s black screen before XP logo
2.4s at "loading bar" before XP logo
22.4s at XP logo loading
11.0s black screen after logo, before blue "Logging in" screen
35.2s logging into your account
55.9s to load all startup applications
Anyhow, I unhooked the drive and speed was back to normal. I did some checking, looks like the DMARQ pin is the one that broke. Luckily, it isn't a mandatory pin; but I would still like the drive to work fine again.
I'm wondering, if I disable DMA on the drive, will that allow it to work properly again? It should no longer want to access the broken pin. Second, is the pin fixable? Did I make the right decision putting aluminum in the hole?
Help!
Edit: Upon closer inspection, it looks like the pin was pushed in, not broken. Unfortunately, I don't have any pliers small enough to pull it back up, and tweezers don't have enough grip. I'll have to make a trip to the hardware store. However, I disabled DMA on my IDE channels in the BIOS, and the computer is chugging along perfectly fine for now; must have knocked off 45 seconds of boot time. The good thing is I only use this drive for storage (music, movies, etc.), so anything beyond 60 Mbps is unnecessary. Even PIO Mode 2 provides 8 MBps of bandwidth, just enough if I take into account overhead.