Have you confirmed that you can boot from this hard drive when you plug it into the onboard IDE sockets?

rumbadumba wrote:

Have you confirmed that you can boot from this hard drive when you plug it into the onboard IDE sockets?

Absolutely. It's my main test HDD.

Please note: I'm getting a lot further with this now. I decided to RTFM 😦 and discovered that I must use an 80 pin IDE ribbon cable. I had gone out of my way to get an old retro 40 pin cable, and used that by mistake.

Now, booting up, I see the HDD controller card's BIOS search for any installed HDDs. I haven't got it to boot from the HDD yet, but I'm definitely making progress! 😀

Edit: Solved! I set the boot-up device back to SCSI (after having messed about with various other options), and now everything works. Conclusion: use an 80-pin ribbon cable (and not a very old 40-pin one), if you want the Promise Ultra100TX2 to see your HDD.

I can't tell if you're running a optical drive on that card, but I don't recommend doing that. Those cards often don't do ATAPI well at all and it can cause tons of probs.

In the pic it looks like you're using 40-pin cables. Get 80 pin cables on there ASAP.

edit: seems you figured out that 40-pin is bad. 40-pin = UDMA33 max, so using that on a UDMA100 card is kinda dumb 😉

swaaye wrote:

I can't tell if you're running a optical drive on that card, but I don't recommend doing that. Those cards often don't do ATAPI well at all and it can cause tons of probs.

In the pic it looks like you're using 40-pin cables. Get 80 pin cables on there ASAP.

edit: seems you figured out that 40-pin is bad. 40-pin = UDMA33 max, so using that on a UDMA100 card is kinda dumb 😉

I am getting some really strange behaviour with an "Ultra DMA 2" DVD-ROM reader drive plugged in to the controller's IDE port 2. At first, it was happy with it. Now it's complaining that the ATAPI device is incompatible. Also, the controller's BIOS seems to hang if I don't set the mobo's BIOS to enable the onboard IDE, even though there's nothing plugged in to those ports!

I think I will remove the optical drive (and its cable from the controller's IDE port 2), and just be satisfied that the controller's IDE port 1 + HDD seems to work well. 😀 And for the first time, it's given my mobo access to all of my HDD, and not just 137gb of it!

Edit:

I think I've progressed further with this issue.

I did these steps:

1) Inside the "standard BIOS section", where you set up your HDDs and ATAPI devices, etc - I set everything to uninstalled.
2) I set the onboard IDE ports to disable.
3) Set the first boot up device to be SCSI, everything else to disable.
4) I also used an 80 pin cable on the controller card's IDE port 1 for the HDD, but used a 40 pin cable for the optical drive on its IDE port 2.

Everything seems to work, to a degree. The HDD behaved normally. Also, I tried 2 optical drives. One modern "Ultra DMA 2" DVD-ROM reader, and a really ancient TEAC 6x CD-ROM "PIO 3" drive. The DVD-ROM reader behaved normally, but the ancient TEAC device behaved oddly. It was slow, and appeared to keep "re-reading" the disc, although it's not dirty. I guess this could either be due to the controller's incompetence at handling ATAPI optical drives, or possibly the drive was failing somehow. Of course, it could also have been "pilot error"! 😉

Make sure all the cards surface mounted components are present. I can't tell how many times this has caused me heartache.

Sad to hear about your problems!
Partly because I have the exact same card... 😜

Anyway, here's a nifty thread I found when researching my socket5 IDE problems (no onboard IDE, add-in cards only):

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f7/ide-controllers-d … 30/index13.html

Seems like the SiiG cards are somewhat better at ATAPI.... ?
(start from page 1)

Moogle! wrote:

Make sure all the cards surface mounted components are present. I can't tell how many times this has caused me heartache.

I examined the card to check for any signs of damage, but on this occasion, I couldn't find anything which looked broken or missing. I think my problems are either "pilot error" 😉 or the card itself isn't doing it's job very well.

bestemor wrote:

Sad to hear about your problems! Partly because I have the exact same card... :pppt: […]
Show full quote

Sad to hear about your problems!
Partly because I have the exact same card... 😜

Anyway, here's a nifty thread I found when researching my socket5 IDE problems (no onboard IDE, add-in cards only):

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f7/ide-controllers-d … 30/index13.html

Seems like the SiiG cards are somewhat better at ATAPI.... ?
(start from page 1)

Thanks very much for the link! 😁 I'll check it out!

Just for a bit of fun, I'm going to try installing a 16-bit ISA CD-ROM controller card, and see if I can get an old TEAC 6x speed IDE CD-ROM working on it.

Edit: And it worked. Very well in fact.