I revently upgraged my motherboard to a Tyan Trinity 1590. Since I upgraded, I can't seem to get my LS120 drive to work. My system Info is as follows:

AMD k6-200 processor
Windows 95 OSR2
Diamond Monster Fusion Video Card
Generic 16 bit sound card
LT Winmodem
64 mg PC-100 sdram
Maxtor 5.0 gig Hard on Primary/Master
Maxtor 2.0 gig Hard on Secondary/Master
Goldstar 8x CD rom on Secondary/Slave

I have used to have the ls120 as the slave on the primary ide. But I tride removing all drives (except the primary master) and running the ls 120 as the secondary master.

The Bios automatically recognizes the LS120, and Windows automatically configures for it. The problem is the drive continues to start and re-start with nothing happening.

Digital Research Tech, Superdisk, and Tyan have been no help.

Any information would be appreciated.

Have you done a reality check? Hook the drive up to another machine to make sure it is still working?

Sorry, forgot to metion that the drive does work in another machine. Also, I borrowed a friends LS120, and I have the same problem.

Ok - when you do an F8 and choose Command Prompt Safe Mode, does the drive work? It should be drive A at that point, and work just like a floppy. Same idea - can you boot from it?

I also run an ls120 with no problems so I will give you my config which may work on your machine.
Run both your hard drives together,one as master the other as slave. Put your cd on the other ide as master with the ls120 as slave.
Provided your bios auto recognises the setup & you can configure the search order for a boot drive, this will allow you to use the ls as a boot no problems.
Can't hurt to try eh?

Well, I tired to boot in dos mode (using F8, Command Prompt) and the drive worked fine. Typed WIN to go to windows, the drive worked fine. After a little experimenting, I have found that if I have a disk in the ls120 during boot-up (it is not a system disk) the drive works fine. But if there is not a disk in the drive, then the drive will not work properly.

I guess I now know what to do to make the drive work, the question is why?

Hi davdns, Go to the link below, I'm sure it was there I saw information about your problem. If memory serves me it was something about "certain" systems not recognizing the drive if the media wasn't inserted and there was a way to fix it. My own LS-120 has begun to have problems reading the disk on the first insertion, but I think that might be dust accumulating in the drive.

http://www.helponthe.net/nathan

I ordered an LS120 cleaning kit from superdisk. I get the same result--the disk must be in for the entire boot-up process in order for the drive to work. I have searched the net and found no similar problems.

Unless somebody has a brilliant idea (like throw the thing out the window), you can close down this discussion.

Well, the only answer can be the motherboard. Something is wrong with the way the BIOS reads the LS120.

Thats the only answer that fits your situation - more than one drive does this, and your drive is ok elsewhere, so we know it isn't the drive.

The BIOS must require media to be found to recognize the drive correctly. Does tyan have an update of the BIOS available?