IDE auto detection during startup, waste of my time (Rant)

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Sokartawi
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IDE auto detection during startup, waste of my time (Rant)

Post by Sokartawi »

I just had to say this at some point. The newer motherboards, instead of detecting IDE drives in the BIOS, they now do it at every damn startup, and what's worse, if you have a writer with a disk in there, it's not uncommon that it will take 10 seconds before detecting the drive. What's worse, you cannot switch the detection sequence off.

What kind of nonsense is this? Too many lamers around that buy a new harddisk/CDRom, then come back with "It doesn't work" because they didn't tell the damn PC there is a new device in there? How about asking in the shop how to install the damn thing if you're not sure how to do it! I'm getting so completely sick of everything having to be plug-and-play and 100% noob-friendly, at the cost of speed and performance (windows being a prime example of this). And now they discriminate against the ones CAN use a PC properly, by removing the ability to turn these bullshit things off.

Also I upgraded a PC at work with a new mobo. That damn thing would look for SATA drives during startup. That takes another 10 seconds or so. On my motherboard (A7N8X), there's a hidden jumper which disables this detection, thus speeding up the startup sequence. This new mobo (also an Asus) lacked this jumper. Why? Is it so hard to have one damn little extra jumper on it? Why go look for something which I am sure I'll not install on the PC?

Okay, that's it, feeling a lot better already :x
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Post by Einhander Sn0m4n »

It seems they underestimate our ability to meticulously follow directions. Or they just pander to the lowest common denominator and let us Superbrights suffer...
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Post by Sokartawi »

Einhander Sn0m4n wrote:It seems they underestimate our ability to meticulously follow directions.
Well actually, their strategy seems to be "don't make any crossroads at all, so no-one needs directions"
Einhander Sn0m4n wrote:Or they just pander to the lowest common denominator and let us Superbrights suffer...
Probably...
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Re: IDE auto detection during startup, waste of my time (Ran

Post by MKSheppard »

Sokartawi wrote:I just had to say this at some point. The newer motherboards, instead of detecting IDE drives in the BIOS, they now do it at every damn startup, and what's worse, if you have a writer with a disk in there, it's not uncommon that it will take 10 seconds before detecting the drive. What's worse, you cannot switch the detection sequence off.
I like this. It allows me to know right away at bootup if something is
SERIOUSLY WRONG, rather than booting up windows, and finding a missing
hard drive :x
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Re: IDE auto detection during startup, waste of my time (Ran

Post by Sokartawi »

MKSheppard wrote:
Sokartawi wrote:I just had to say this at some point. The newer motherboards, instead of detecting IDE drives in the BIOS, they now do it at every damn startup, and what's worse, if you have a writer with a disk in there, it's not uncommon that it will take 10 seconds before detecting the drive. What's worse, you cannot switch the detection sequence off.
I like this. It allows me to know right away at bootup if something is
SERIOUSLY WRONG, rather than booting up windows, and finding a missing
hard drive :x
But how often does it happen that something is wrong and your drive is missing? Not very often I hope. Anyway, you lose more time in total by waiting for that thing to finish searching every time you start the PC (unless you are one of those guys that has the PC on 24x7), then the one in a tenthousand or so chance that you waste the 20 seconds for windows to load and then find that something is wrong.
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Post by Batman »

1. Unless there's been a radical redesign in PC BIOS design philosophy in the last year or so the BIOS auto-detecting IDE devices is your own damn fault. You don't want it to do that? DON'T leave the IDE devices on AUTO-DETECT.
Let it detect your devices once, and hard-select them there. Problem solved.
2. I happen to like this feature. While you might argue one does not need it all that often, when one does, it comes in handily. IF you somehow miss a drive, knowing wether or not the BIOS recognizes it is a damn useful bit of data, because if it doesn't, chances are it's not a software problem.
Same if you have to find out wether your drive is toast or it's just that Winblows went tits-up.
And NO, it's NOT because I used to fix PCs for a living. That situation has come up time and again in my private life, too (including my very own PC a couple of times. Okay, so those were mostly SCSI situations, but the priciple is the same...)
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Post by Sokartawi »

Batman wrote:1. Unless there's been a radical redesign in PC BIOS design philosophy in the last year or so the BIOS auto-detecting IDE devices is your own damn fault. You don't want it to do that? DON'T leave the IDE devices on AUTO-DETECT.
Let it detect your devices once, and hard-select them there. Problem solved.
Of course I tried that... Works fine for harddisks, doesn't work for CDRoms. There are 3 options in there:
IDE Auto detection (which does nothing but puts in the name of the in the previous menu)
then a second option which can be put to Auto, Manual and None
then a third option which can be put to Auto, CHS, LBA or Large

No matter what I do, it will either keep autodetecting, or not detect the drives at all. For example, I tried autodetecting in BIOS, which puts the correct name in the overview menu, then set the thing to manual, auto, but that STILL makes the thing autodetect on startup, and sais it cannot find a device. When I go back to the BIOS, the device is gone from the overview. Mobo is A7N8X Deluxe, but had similar problems with other newer mobos.
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Post by Vertigo1 »

Check for a BIOS update?
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Post by Pu-239 »

On my computer, you set your drive to "none" for anything other than a hard drive. Anyway, if you think you have it bad, try having both an Ultra100TX2 ATA adapter and a SCSI adapter- both of which take forever to boot.

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Post by Glocksman »

It doesn't take all that long, maybe about 5-10 seconds longer.
I have an nforce 2 mobo and a Promise ATA card in my machine.

There are 3 optical drives (CDRW, DVD, DVD burner) connected to the mobo IDE and dual Seagate 80 GB drives connected as master on each channel of the promise card.

I can live with the slightly longer boot times.
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Post by Shinova »

Interesting. My BIOS takes no longer than a second to recognize its 2 hard drives, 1 zip drive and DVD-RW. After that it doesn't go through that same procedure again no matter how many restarts, only does it again after you turn the power off.

Then I again I manually set all the jumpers on the drives to their correct positions---I hear about people putting their on auto-detect or something; don't know about that.
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Post by Sokartawi »

Bios update didn't work, should contact ASUS about this.

It only does this when I have a disk in a writer station though. And this is not just one PC, all PCs take such an insane time to detect the writers when there are disks in them.
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