Data Lifeguard Diagnostic reports multiple drives incorrectly

Community Archives Other Software & Accessories
1

I have five WDC IDE drives hooked up to my system, two of them as master and slave through a single dual channel IDE connecter on the motherboard and three of them through a Silicon Image-based 0680 dual connecter, dual channel PCI controller card. My problem is that WDC Data Lifeguard Diagnostic version 1.22 reports in the top panel that the three drives on the controller are all the same drive, when in fact, they are all different:

  1. WDC1600JB-00REA0 - no jumper - alone on its dual IDE channel
  2. WDC800JB-00CRA1 - jumpered as master
  3. WDC1600JB-00DAA0 - jumpered as slave

Data Lifeguard Diagnostic reports them all as being the same model and having the same serial number. However, if I right click on a drive in the upper panel and select ‘Properties’, DLD reports the drives as being all the same drive in the upper portion of the Properties dialog box, but reports the volume and capacity of the drives correctly in the window at the bottom of the Properties dialog box entitled, “Volume(s) contained on this drive”.

If I want to test these three drives on the controller card I have to remove the drive that is being reported as all three drives from my system. When I do that the remaining two drives are both reported as the same drive model and serial number as one of these two remaining drives. To test the last drive I have to remove the drive that is being reported as both drives from my system.

Does anyone have a clue as to what might be causing this? This is happening on a system with a new P4 Intel MB with squeaky clean XP installation. I would suspect the controller card but for the fact that XP Device Manager reports the model numbers of all five drives correctly.

Thanks for any help,
Jack

2

Hi there, is there any way to test the drives separately? o.o

3

Hi, have you tried removing the DLG from the system and then re-Install it again?

4

Uninstall and reinstalling of DLD did not solve the problem

5

Not sure what you mean by “test the drives separately”. Is there any other way to test drives other than separately? Besides, the problem is that DLD reports the three drives on the PCI controller card as all being the same drive. IOW, it reports three instances of the same drive, with the same model number and same serial number. And as I mentioned in my original post, XP Device Manager reports all three drives correctly.

6

i guess he reffered to connecting the drives directly to the MOBO, with using the controller card

7

I tested them separately as explained in the original post

8

Apparently there are issues with accessing S.M.A.R.T. data from multiple drives connected to a PCI controller card. At this point I don’t believe DLD or the WDC drives are at fault.

Speedfan is able to access S.M.A.R.T. data from drives and it exhibits the same limitations as DLD

I googled: --“S.M.A.R.T. data” pci controller-- …and others have had similar issues. If I make any discoveries I will post them. Otherwise I consider this problem solved