I've been on this computer for 7 years. It's a Presario 5700 series with the following configuration: 320 Megs of ram, PIII 500 and is running five drives:

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IDE: Primary Secondary [Floppy]
---- ------- ---------- ------
0: HDD DVD-ROM Floppy
1: CD-RW Zip 100
|_(j. on 'CS')
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Before, the HDD and CD-RW were in reverse postions (SL/MS).
Although the CD-RW was on the ("0","0"), the jumper set. was left to SL (factory default). Everything worked just fine, except when I ran the Buffer/Cable test in Compaq Diagnostics... it produced this weird error: "Buffer / Cable test failed: Write & Read buffers are Different". I told HP about this, and they recommended to try a new cable. I also mentioned the fact (to HP) that my CD-RW drive shared the same cable with it.

The entire misconfiguartion was entirely my fault. At the time, I didn't know anything about jumpers, Slave/Master or even what "cable select" meant. All I did was grabbed the available connection on the Primary cable, (which happened to be the Master) and hook it up.

The first thing I tried was disconnecting the CD-RW from the Primary cable, to let the HDD have it all by itself. This produced the following error code when the drive booted: "1782: Disk Controller Failure". Then, I tried changing the HDD position from SL to MS on the Primary cable, and it fixed both the BIOS and Compaq Diangnoistics error messages.

The problem is now I've gotta reconnect my CD-RW drive. Now, instead of just hooking everything up like it is now (like it's supposed to be), I tried hooking them up in many different strange configuartions, diagnostically, including changing jumper settings, cables, and so forth, in order to try to recreate the error messages. And although neither of the weird error messages ever appeared again, every time I tried changing something around the (BIOS) might not even totally recognize it! I mean- SOMTIMES it would, or other times it only half-would, or possibly it would not even recognize either deivce at all. Finally, I tried reconnecting the HD back onto the Primary cable in the Master position. The BIOS recognized it, and worked OK. Then, I set the CD-RW's jumper setting to the CS position (where it belongs because my Computer supports CS), and plugged it onto the Primary cable (as the Slave-middle). Again, the BIOS recognized it and now it works OK.

So now I have the configuration as noted in the table at the top. And both of the weird error messages, (although they were never big deal in the first place), are now completely gone. The only problem is, I wonder if I might might have messed something up with the BIOS, after having done all of the weird configuartion stuff.


Is it possibe to incur damage from making the BIOS settings change around so much like that? Should I maybe actually try to reconfigure everything back to the way it was before? (just a joke, obviously)