Thanks for the heads up. Theres not a lot of people out there installing Promise Ultra 100 cards in Meda GX systems. You might be the only person. I've had all kinds of problems with Promise cards, and its probably not the hardware it's the terrible drivers with promise products. So I avoid them. Are you overclocking the PCI bus in anyways? Or are you experiencing general instablity with the onboard controller becasue of overclocking so you want to use a add on controller? You might want to consider finding a compatible SIL based controller since that looks like it might work for you.

Warlord wrote on 2022-02-16, 06:08:

Thanks for the heads up. Theres not a lot of people out there installing Promise Ultra 100 cards in Meda GX systems. You might be the only person. I've had all kinds of problems with Promise cards, and its probably not the hardware it's the terrible drivers with promise products. So I avoid them. Are you overclocking the PCI bus in anyways? Or are you experiencing general instablity with the onboard controller becasue of overclocking so you want to use a add on controller? You might want to consider finding a compatible SIL based controller since that looks like it might work for you.

Nah, the bus is at the stock 33mhz. I'm trying to use a PCI controller so I have DMA support in windows: I do plan to run some early 3D games and play with some early 3d cards on the system (Initial setup will be on a nVidia Vanta, but I plan to play around with an STB Riva 128, an ATI Rage Pro Turbo AIW, a PCI Voodoo 3 at a minimum and perhaps the Rendition Verite, Macronix based Voodoo rush, and perhaps an S3 Virge if I feel masochistic) so any boost helps. The onboard controller has some weird drivers that are a pain to get installed and functional (one wrong step and you've nuked your install) and I'm fed up with trying to make them work for the time being. I've tried a Sil based SATA controller with similar freezes on initial reboot. I know of at least one person on Vogons who uses Promise Ultra ATA cards in his Media GX, so these issues baffle me to be honest...

Update: so booting an install (from another system, a 16 gb hdd) off of the onboard IDE controller, installing the driver, and then booting my install off the card worked. I guess the Sil based SATA controller just has an incompatibility with the P5GX-M mobo. Now I can clone that install to the 64 gb IDE SSD I was planning to use (the mobo bios doesn't like HDDs larger that 32 GB). Nice thing is I can image this install with all but the VGA driver installed, that'll make swapping VGA cards easier.

Got the install cloned to my larger SSD and the computer works fine. Installed Detonator 2.08 PCI version for the Vanta without issue (wanted to use my Riva 128 but it wouldn't output an image, it worked last time I tested it, so I'll have to test it on another mobo, might be an odd incompatability) and DXdiag passes. Now to hunt down a version of NVtweak that works with it (Coolbits didn't seem to unlock any options), get a feel for the CPU tweaking programs that work with the MediaGX (wanna see how much they actually help) and, oh yeah, play some games!!!