Odd technical problem to overcome....

[shaithis]

Just finished modding an IDE caddie and it works, unless I boot the PC up with no drive in the caddie........If I do that the BIOS takes a while to scan IDE drives and windows hangs while booting.

The odd thing I have done is to add an ABit IDE -> SATA converter on the back of the caddies cage as I wanted to remove all the 40 pin cables, this is the culprit as it works fine when its empty and connected via a standard 40 pin IDE cable.

I currently have disabled the SATA port in the BIOS to boot with the caddie connected (but empty) but it kind of defeats the pupose of a hot-swap caddie (and I do need to hot-swap it regularly).

Any BIOS, driver or other tweek anyone can think of trying?

[icq3800846]

I have no experience of this at all, and so this is a stab in the dark, but I am guessing that the SATA>IDE converter is providing "some" sort of feedback on the IDE channel which the motherboard is guessing is some sort of hard drive.

If you disable BIOS from searching for new drives by specifying NONE on the channel you won't have this problem, but then you won't be able to use the drive either.

Again, another guess, but I am assuming that you need to get a SATA HDD hot swap caddy or just buy a rounded IDE cable and throw that SATA>IDE converter away.