NF3 250Gb blinks HDD LED on CD drive activity

[Drax7]

I've worked most of the bugs out of my nF3 250Gb system, but this last one is really annoying me. I have a normal IDE DVD/CDRW combo drive, and a SATA HDD. The drives all work fine, but the HDD activity case light (which is hooked up to the normal place on the motherboard) blinks on either HDD or CD activity.

 

This is more annoying than it sounds, because Windows queries the drive every second to check for disk insertion. That means my LED blinks every second even when the system is idle. :eek:

 

I have tried every combination of setting the CD for master/slave, tried it on both of the IDE channels, etc. Nothing makes any difference. I've even tried a different CD drive, not that I expected that to make any difference. Do others have this problem with the combination of IDE CD and SATA HDD?

 

Any suggestions would be very appreciated!

 

System configuration:

Lanparty UT nF3 250Gb

Athlon 64 3200+ (Rev. CG)

Samsung SP1614C 160GB SATA HD

AOpen DVD/CD-RW IDE drive

(1) Crucial Ballistix 512MB PC3200 DIMM

Windows XP SP2

Cooler Master Centurion 5 Case

SeaSonic Super Tornado 350W PS

Rosewill nVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Video Card, 128MB DDR

[Maarek_Stele]

I've seen the disk activity led in cases blink with ide cd-rom access since 95 when I got my first that was not on a separate controler. The hdd led is usually a IDE acess led (and on most mobos it works with sata channels too), not exclusively an hard disk led. The blinking during windows is normal, remember hd's have their SMART routines, etc, more than the usual windows background services. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, hope it helps.

[Drax7]

I have four other computers in my house (and see hundreds more at work) and none of them behave this way. I certainly understand what you are saying about the LED being for IDE activity, but somehow other manufacturers distinguish between the signals. My guess is that they only blink on activity for the primary master or something like that. I think the problem is that regardless of how I set the CD drive jumpers and which IDE controller I hook it up to, the mobo still sees the CD as the primary master and therefore worthy of blinking.

 

So while I understand what's happening, it's still annoying and wrong.

[Maarek_Stele]

Sorry then. The last 2 754 mobos I had did this too and blinked when idle, an asus k8v dx (died due to bad quality caps) and an abit kv8-max3 for wich I replaced it with. The asus didn't even blink the led on SATA acess, only ide (where I only had cdrom drives), I guess this issue was corrected in the SE version.

IIRC, my slot A kx133 gigabyte I had did this too, but I just checked that the a7v133 and a7a266 don't, I don't remember about the dfi ak-75 I had but I'm under the impression it did too (cd-rom were used as masters always).