Hi John,

Pleased to see that you have solved your problem. However, be aware that the
maximum length (according to the official standard) for 80-conductor PATA
cables is 18 inches (45 cm) from end to end. There are cables which exceed
this length available, but they may or may not work as intended. My advice,
therefore, is to stick with cables of the recommended specification. If you
wish, you can also use rounded cables. These cables generally employ the
'twisted pair' technique, where a data line is paired up, and twisted
together with, one of the grounding wires. Although these cables are the same
length as the conventional flat ones, they are easier to install and can, in
some cases, be used in systems where the conventional flat type doesn't
appear to be long enough.
Dwarf

"John T" wrote:

YOU GUYS NAILED IT!!

Thanks for the advise; I used the 40 wire cable. When i connected a 80 wire
ribbon, the problem disappeared.

Now I have to get a longer ribbon so that I can have both the CD ROM and the
DVD writer working as they did on the other board.

I do have the latest version to Britannica, the 2008 version. thanks for the
offer, but because I already had another version of Britannica that would not
work on Vista, they gave me a very good deal on a new copy
"Dwarf" wrote:

Hi John,

It sounds as though you have other problems with your machine. I agree with
Colin in that if you do use PATA drives, you are better off using the
80-wire, 40-pin IDE cables as opposed to the 40-wire versions. It sounds as
though your initial installation of Vista was far from smooth. Reboot your
machine and check the settings in your BIOS (refer to the manual for details
on accessing this routine). In particular, check the data transfer mode for
your optical drive(s). It sounds as though this could be set to PIO mode,
which is an extremely slow mode that can hog system resources. This should be
set to its highest available setting, typically UDMA. I would advise that you
reinstalled Vista (make sure that you have the correct storage adapter driver
available) and that you have just 1 partition on your hard drive. You can
still use multiple partitions on hard drives if you so wish, but modern
filing systems are able to use larger disks more effectively so this isn't
really necessary on modern systems. Older filing systems could, up to certain
limitations, access large disks. However, the larger the disk, the larger the
sector block size. Each sector is typically 512 bytes long, and multiple
sectors make up a block. Each file occupies at least 1 block, whether that
file be a few bytes in size or a few kilobytes or more. In order to reduce
wasted space, older systems typically used partitioned hard drives.
Dwarf



"Colin Barnhorst" wrote:

You need to use an 80-wire, 40-pin IDE cable with Vista. The 80-wire cables
reduce the crosstalk between the 40 active wires. The 40-wire cables were
only effective in the days of much slower systems. Such an older cable
would indeed give the effect you are describing.

"John T" wrote in message
...
Sorry if I was not clear

I re-used the old cable, a 40 pin IDE, I believe. It worked well on XP
with
the other Asus mobo.

Yes, I installed the chipset software after I finally got Vista to work, I
had a nightmare with it--15 hours with the guys in India trying to help.

This was a clean install of vista, on a clean hard drive


"solidliquidgas" wrote:


Have you tried reading other discs in your CD/DVD drive? How about
copying data from other sources to the destination partition? If you
narrow the problem down to the CD/DVD drive and it's not a driver or
firmware issue, there could be a problem with the drive itself or the
data cable.

Incidentally, when you say you did a major upgrade, do you mean a major
hardware upgrade involving the CPU and MoBo? And/or did you upgrade
your version of Windows?If the answer to either is "yes", did you
install the chipset software for the new board or for the existing board
in the new operating system?


--
solidliquidgas

I miss my Commodore 64. It was such a simpler time...