Hi all,

I was curious for the reasons that many of the posts have recommended to not use the cable select features with UBCD4Win. I've searched to see if there were reasons listed and was unable to quickly find them if they are listed on the forum.

Many years ago (read old computers) I had seen unreliable cable select issues but at that time it was never determined if it were the motherboards, cables or hard drives themselves causing the trouble. On newer equipment, I haven't seen any issue.

it's even worse than that.

Here in my shop I have run accross some motherboards that will not run properly unless the hard drives/cd/dvdrom drives dont work at all unless they are on cable select.

It used ot be true that selecting master slave was mandatory but this is not the case anymore on the large scale. There may still be some mothervaords that do work better useing master slave though so I would say it is an option for those who need ot use it.

It is also important to make sure you have put master and slave on the proper order since the master should always be at the end of the cable and slave in the middle.

Hmm... now I haven't seen one that requires cable select yet and I've been working professionally on PC's for about 16+ yrs... So I know it matters which end is plugged into the MB, Slave and Master. Basically, I started about the time that MSDOS went from 3.21 to 3.3 (yeah... going by another thread on the forum.. I think that makes me OLD )

I have found some cables that were altered by the manufacturers that would cause something like that but I keep a stock of UDMA cables so I'll test for that straight away if I have an issue like that.

I've also always used upper end Giga-byte, MSI and Asus MB's so most of my customers have a great foundation (unlike what I"m seeing from HP, Compaq and now even Dell). This may contribute to why I don't see an issue like this which is why I was asking.

My question isn't urgent... its academic so I can recognize the problem. So far, of the users that were told about this that I've read, most problems appear to have been a drive overlay (GoBack for certain on one) and some may have been memory related... the others weren't resolved or identified from what I could see.

I have seen a couple of these over the years also, I think they were Acer & Packard Bell, but I'm not positive.
If you look closer at the mainboard on these systems you will find that the MFG jumpered the ide conector
(or used a board trace) to fix the CS setting instead of stocking the propper CS cable.

Here is a good explination of the different cables & how CS works.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCS-c.html

I have had nothing but headaches from cable select & just don't like it.

There have been many times that when troubleshooting a bartpe build (UBCD) the final solution
was to not use the CS setting. Sometimes switching to an 80 conductor cable solved the problem.
This is mainly because as of the 80 conductor cable, CS is properly implemented.

Older cables come in a variety of configurations & are not all the same, some work better than others.

At the same time some computers just plain suck. I had one a couple of years ago that
needed a burner added to it. So we added a Sony CD-RW & the damn thing would not boot.
We tried 7 different drives, both CD & CD-R(W) & nothing worked.
The only drive that would work in this system, was one made by the MFG of that system.
We actually had to order the CD-RW drive from ACER before it would even boot.

@rdsok
If you are not having any trouble with UBCD, then disregard the CS advice.
BUT if you can't get it to work no matter what you try, then look closely at the drive configuration.

As long as the equipment you are testing has all 80 conductor cables you should be fine,
But I still see plenty of PC's that do not.

Some of the programs we use in a multi-boot CD simply will not work with the CS setting.
I still use PQDI & won't switch untill it does not work any more.
This program in particular always seems to comes up with a failed image if CS is used.

Hope this helps.

@hilander999

Thanks for the input... I'll have to dust off my PQDI disk and play now... I was planning to test DiskImage XML anyway so it would be a good comparison with that. I think the last time I used PQDI, 40p cables were the rule and not the exception in a system. It may be an interesting test.... of course it may not be fair.. a DOS based (the version of PQDI I have is 3.x) and WinXP based software isn't really an apples to apples type of test. I'll certainly be adding CS vs MS/SL tests into the mix now.

ack got me beat. I was in college in the 3.0 days. For the older stuff I was always an amiga person. I didn't get into doing my own shop until about 97 or 98. I do have over 20 years of experience with computers. Just not running my own shop. Most of my older experience was programming and things like that.

I even used some older cray systems when i was in the military. Interesting stuff.

I to check the jumpers allot. I have only seen a few that required cs and I think it had more to do with the drive than the motherboard. The drive just would not work no matter what else I did.

Who knows though since the quality of even the high end boards has gone down hill allot over the last few years. It's amazing how many systems by the big guys include low end motherboard in the mid and high end systems. I don't really get surprised by what I see anymore.

I've only owned my own business since Sept 1, 2001.. (easy for me to remember since 10 days later was the 9-11 incident). I started working on computers with SWB/AT&T in '78, moved to PC's in '88-89 and became the GM for the wholesaler I was working for in about a year... after that I usually was the head tech/manager for the shops I worked in until I went in with a partner in 2001 after the company we were working for closed its doors.

The cool thing about this business... there are so many fields in it, you can never know it all and even to this day, I still find out about new repair methods or something I wasn't aware of... it just doesn't happen as often now (not sure if that is due to age or the existing knowledge I have).

How dare you mention the devil in this post ACER.............. horrible, horrible PC's I wouldn't have one even if you gave me a hundred. Nearly as bad are compaq's I've never come across a decent one yet.

Never come across the problem of having to have the CS selected to get them to work.

They are much worse than Compaq, if that's possible. At least this one was.

Have you ever seen one with an optical drive that was not made by them(ACER)?

Yes because I changed it to a CD-RW

I've tried my best to get rid of the Acers in this dept, the old Acer 3000 Desktop (I think this was the model number) where awful. If you took one apart you could never get the damm thing to back together again as it was. Once the floppy drive had been moved that was it you where forever having to take it apart as the floppies kept getting stuck as the drive wouldn't line up right with the floppy hole so the push button would eject the floppy. It was a very badly designed case, even getting the cover back on was a struggle which usually meant me bending the case with a few swear words though in for good measure.

However due to budget we have a few still left, but the are mini towers to they aren't too bad to work with.

The other bit of hardware I avoid like the plague are celerons, they have to be the worst cpu ever produced - intel just cripple them to make them virtually unusable. The AMD budget cpu's are much better, we've got a 64bit sempron at work and to say it's a budget cpu it's really impressed me.

23 ways to speed up XP

Read #9 As it isn't everything you are looking for and probably already know this information as I did. I was reading this article yesterday and then read this and thought I would share it.

Interesting read, nothing new although personally I disagree with the partition comments. For me partition the hdd allows for faster defragging as your not moving files around that don't need to be. And on a personal level I've noticed that having large files on my C drive affects the connectivity of my adsl modem. If I have files on it over say 700mb + I find that it doesn't want to connect. If I remove these files it detects the adsl line straight away as soon as I log in.

I'll add the link into the tips/tweaks in the software forum.

Be very careful with that list. Though most of it is helpful (though nothing new), # 6, 11, and 18 are very wrong. The cleaning of the Prefetch folder myth has been mentioned before and you can find more information HERE. You NEVER want to remove startup programs using MSCONFIG. That's the worst utility ever. Always either try disabling the services or removing the startup program/process from both the Startup folder and the Windows Registry 'Run' area. And, I agree with stidyup, partitioning doesn't hurt anything and can sometimes actually help the system, depending on your needs.

why is msconfig so bad? Sometimes it's the only tool available for a job and is better than nothing although I prefer to use startupcpl and hijackthis.

About acers. did you know that the same company owns or sibsidaries are

a-open motherboards(I have never had good experiences that I can remember with these)

ali now uli chipsets(currently makes some of the best you can buy for athlon64)

and just found out recently that the acer aopen cdrom stuff was spun off into it's own company:
BENQ

When I went looking for info about these drives they are getting good reviews at least for their dvd burners and come in only second to plextor and a little ahead of nec since they seem to be more compatable with more media than nec.

I found this interesting as I quite using their cdroms long ago due to racing issues were they would speed up then slow down all the time. I ordered only a couple benqs to see how they do but have been happy with the nec's so far.

anybody else know anything about the benq's?

msconfig is really just annoying and does nothing for you. If you modify something then every time you boot the system it comes up. I prefer to use 3rd party software to take care of the startup items and other options that msconfig shows you. These programs actually allow you to remove or disable items from your startup.

I agree after reading many articles....the PreFetch thing is a myth, don't do it!

I also agree with the partitioning thing. Fred Langa always recommends you split up your large hard drives into multiple partitions.

I haven't read the article posted yet....just wanted to comment and backup some of the stuff talked about.

well i know all that about msconfig but is that the only reason why people hate it because it pops up after a reboot?

Admittedly it is annoying but in a pinch it can help. To be honest though I rarely use anything besides hijackthis anymore.

There are certainly better options than MSCONFIG out there, but it hard to beat the fact that its available on all systems since Win98 was released except of course Win2k. This alone makes it handy since you don't have to bring or install another utility.

As to the Prefetch arguements. I do clear mine from time to time, but not regularly. I do this more for housekeeping reasons than anything since I will test a lot of different programs and then never use them again. I really don't do this for performance reasons and since they (the prefetch data) will be recreated again on the next use of a program, it has only a short term impact on the programs I do use regularly.

The MSConfig tool is NOT reliable. I've had it on many occassions not disable programs from startup or cause other problems when it shouldn't have. Plus, yes, it does usually pop up with a message after boot up. That's why the best way (and still easy) is to just go into the registry and manually delete the startup processes as I can guarantee once they are gone from the "Run" area in the registry (and also the Startup folder in the Programs folder from the Start menu, and the Services manager), it wont ever startup again. Msconfig can't do all of those and since I've done them so much, it only takes a few seconds and of course, those 3 methods are available on any Windows system.

true.

@LittlBUGer

I certainly wouldn't argue those points with you either... but the only thing I use a startup manager for is to temporarily disable an item to see if it may be the cause of a problem (I don't play games much personally). If I'm planning to permanantly disable it, I do just as you said, go to the registry and delete it or in the case of a service I may make an exception and just disable it using the services.msc depending on what it is, for instance a malware service will just be deleted while a program or MS service I will probably just disable it.

Generally a startup manager wouldn't be my first choice if I needed different profiles for different startup configs... say one for work and one for gaming as an example, so I was only speaking about using it for troubleshooting or testing a single instance only and if I'm working on a clients system, I'm not going to install a third party product just for that purpose alone, I'd need more reasons that just that.