emusonacid!

I recently installed an internal IDE 20 gig Hard drive in my E6400 Ultra. Since then my screen randomly gets darker and harder to read. I also have a SCSI zip drive and CD rom drive connected. Is the IDE drive drawing to much power, whats up?

If I look down on the screen from an angle it looks ok but looking straight on its funny looking. But as I said this is a random thing like the voltage is fluctuating. But I'm not a tech so I don't really know what I'm talking about. Any ideas?

I've heard of this happening when you install a hard drive - the hard drive will be taking too much power. Does it improve if you put the hard drive in 'sleep' mode?

i'm pretty new to all this myself, so take it all with a healthy dose of salt but i just installed a 120 Gb ide drive into my 64ultra and it all works fine

i got loads of info before i bought the drive as i thought it might drain the power and cause corruption and an early death...apparently though the emu can spare enough to run an ide drive without any problems

if i were you, first thing i'd check would be that you've installed the drive correctly and use the correct power draws on the board

also think about how modern the ide drive is - new models should be designed to draw minimal power

but i reckon the problem is happening because you've got a scsi zip & drive attached, plus an ide drive and also the floppy...lots of leeching going on there

sorry i don't know why you've got a scsi drive and zip installed - i mean i never looked into those things and don't know how you use them. but mine is just set up with a large modern ide drive and a scsi connection on the back to link to my 'puter and everything works fine

hope this helps somehow

I've got the Zip and CD-Rom attached as I'm in the process off putting all my sounds onto the IDE drive. It is a secondhand drive but I checked the power spec's on it. I'll try disconnecting the Zip and CD-Rom.

Don't the zip and CD-ROM drive have their own power supply? It won't make a difference whether they are connected or not.

Yeah your right, they do have their own power supplies. So it can't be that. I followed the EMU instructions for installing a drive. One cable is free which i suppose is for another IDE drive.

Everything wrote:Yeah your right, they do have their own power supplies. So it can't be that. I followed the EMU instructions for installing a drive. One cable is free which i suppose is for another IDE drive.

Everything in the Emu runs off a single PSU. You probably have an older Emu with the weaker 43W PSU and your hard drive is drawing a very large current on the 12V line. This makes the -12VDC LCD contrast bias voltage drop, causing the LCD to go darker (contrast goes up too much to be precise). I had this same exact problem and ended up replacing the power supply to fix it, see here:

viewtopic.php?t=1082

You might want to install a separate PSU for the hard drive like I did so that the Emu PSU doesn't get strained again and fail.

Hope this helps

This is annoying but it is random so I could live with it. What will happen if I just put up with it?

Everything wrote:This is annoying but it is random so I could live with it. What will happen if I just put up with it?

Eventually the power supply will fail from the excessive current draw.