Yesterday, my computer was working fine. No problems, everything as it should be. I set my computer to hibernate, as I do every weekend, and when I started it up this morning, something strange happened. When the BIOS was initializing my hard drives, it had an issue with one of the drives. When it would get to it, it would either display a garbled text string that somewhat resembled the drive name, or it would draw lines or boxes or whatever all over the screen. There are two hard drives attached to the IDE cable. I only have one jumper between the two, so the only settings I can do is to make one master and the other cable select. Here's what I tried; Swapping the jumper Different, known working PATA cable Different power cables (same PSU) One drive at a time The only thing that worked was hooking in one drive at a time. I can use either end of the PATA cable, and any power cable, but it will only work on one drive. As soon as I plug in the other drive, the symptoms I mentioned above will occur. Now, as far as I can tell, this seems to be an issue with the PATA port on the motherboard. The cheapest solution I see to this is to get a SATA hard drive to replace one of my PATAs, and use the one remaining SATA port on my motherboard. Now, to replace a 300 GB PATA drive that's only going to cost $50. The issue isn't replacing the drive, but I really am just curious what the hell happened to my system. Did the motherboard port go bad? Why will it only accept one drive? What's up?
