Hard Drive LED Shows HDD Activity AND CD-ROM Activity

It's the oddest thing... I have a Biostar P4M80-M4 Motherboard. I have
a WD hard drive attached to SATA and a CD-ROM attached to PATA. But
the LED for the hard drive will light up for both the hard drive
activity AND any CD-ROM activity. There doesn't seem to be any
problems with the hardware. Both drives work fine. It's just the odd
LED anomaly. Did I connect something wrong? Bad jumper setting? Or is
this bad design?

<bright.star.being@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1180750191.126221.327460@m36g2000hse.googlegr oups.com...
> It's the oddest thing... I have a Biostar P4M80-M4 Motherboard. I have
> a WD hard drive attached to SATA and a CD-ROM attached to PATA. But
> the LED for the hard drive will light up for both the hard drive
> activity AND any CD-ROM activity. There doesn't seem to be any
> problems with the hardware. Both drives work fine. It's just the odd
> LED anomaly. Did I connect something wrong? Bad jumper setting? Or is
> this bad design?
>
I don't see what is so odd about it. It's an activity light and it's
indicating activity. If you had a PATA hdd attached and it flashed, would
you think it was odd then?
I've got a socket 939 mobo running a X2/4600 which does exactly the same
thing.

SteveH

On Jun 2, 4:17 am, "SteveH" <steve.houghREM...@THISblueyonder.co.uk>
wrote:
> <bright.star.be...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:1180750191.126221.327460@m36g2000hse.googlegr oups.com...> It's the oddest thing... I have a Biostar P4M80-M4 Motherboard. I have
> > a WD hard drive attached to SATA and a CD-ROM attached to PATA. But
> > the LED for the hard drive will light up for both the hard drive
> > activity AND any CD-ROM activity. There doesn't seem to be any
> > problems with the hardware. Both drives work fine. It's just the odd
> > LED anomaly. Did I connect something wrong? Bad jumper setting? Or is
> > this bad design?
>
> I don't see what is so odd about it. It's an activity light and it's
> indicating activity. If you had a PATA hdd attached and it flashed, would
> you think it was odd then?
> I've got a socket 939 mobo running a X2/4600 which does exactly the same
> thing.
>
> SteveH

I thought that the HD LED was only supposed to light up for HD
activity.

On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 02:09:51 -0000, bright.star.being@gmail.com put
finger to keyboard and composed:

>It's the oddest thing... I have a Biostar P4M80-M4 Motherboard. I have
>a WD hard drive attached to SATA and a CD-ROM attached to PATA. But
>the LED for the hard drive will light up for both the hard drive
>activity AND any CD-ROM activity. There doesn't seem to be any
>problems with the hardware. Both drives work fine. It's just the odd
>LED anomaly. Did I connect something wrong? Bad jumper setting? Or is
>this bad design?

The LED indicates activity on the IDE/ATAPI interface. If you want to
show only HD activity, then I don't know whether this is possible
today. Older drives had a 2-pin header to which you could connect an
external activity LED, but modern drives don't seem to have this. I
*have* seen a Maxtor (?) drive that had unpopulated locations on the
PCB for a LED, resistor, and header (to which I added the respective
components), but that appears to be the exception to the rule.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.