First post, by 386SX
Hi,
considering using and finding a good time correct IDE disk drive is not easy and before going for the SD to IDE adapter I was trying to understand why it seems impossible to find a good balanced installation with every cards I've tried in Windows ME with a ECS P6BX-A+ P3-500:
I got:
1) Promise Fastrack TX2300 SATA2 PCI card
2) Sil3112 4 port SATA1 PCI card
3) Sil3514 2 port SATA1 PCI card
4) VIA VT6421 IDE/SATA PCI card
every cards has their bios soldered on the pcb. Now, the first three cards seems to have their own bios at boot to find hard disk (raid usually but works also single mode) but doesn't boot any CD or DVD drive and only the Sil3xxx boards list the dvd drive but can't boot anyway and with this connected it can't boot with the hard disk connected (while both listed).
The Promise card, a much better build solution, seems to only see and boot hard disks and not even listing dvd or cd drives. The fourth card the Via based much cheaper board can't boot both hard disk or dvd drives but seems to see the dvd drive when into Windows both sata or ide.
So I can't find a solution that both boot from dvd for installation and works into windows at the same card with only one of them and not also the Via based as DVD controller.
Second problem: Windows ME tells me that the hard disk is running in paging mode with every controllers. It looks like the disk is going fast but many times has some moment of hang like when cd drive were running in PIO mode. I don't know if it's a normal advice from the o.s. that doesn't understand how the disk is running with an external controller but still the disk drive (in this build a P3-500, I'm using a 40GB SATA 2.5" disk) it's not smooth when for example in games it has to load many times sound effects or similar but other times it goes as expected from a modern disk.
Is there something I can do to configure the system to solve these problems?
Thank