Hmm PCI I see...

Do you have a Linux Live CD to boot and see if the controller works? Or a XP installation on another harddive / machine and see what the controller card gets recognized as...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Hmm PCI I see...

Do you have a Linux Live CD to boot and see if the controller works? Or a XP installation on another harddive / machine and see what the controller card gets recognized as...

I do have some XP installs so I can try that. But before I do here is a picture of it (sorry for bad quality).

Ahh that helps!

Maybe we should have a "pics first" policy here 🤣

This is your manual: http://firstweb.promise.com/upload/Support/Ma … 0_Manual_En.pdf

rick12373 wrote:

Well I have the Promise card in with HDD in IDE1 and CD ROM in IDE2.

As a temporary measure, I would strongly recommend that you remove your CD-ROM entirely from this system to begin with. Get the HDD working first. Forget about the CD-ROM.

I wonder if an Ultra 100 controller is a bit too new for this old 486 board? Long shot idea: Try the controller card in PCI slot 1, and the video card in PCI slot 2.

You've disabled the integrated IDE. The way to "activate" the controller card is lost in my hazy memory, but it's got something to do with a BIOS set up area option where you see the "level" / "edge" option choices. I think.

Edit: Are you using an 80-wire 40-pin IDE cable?

RG100 made a very good point!

I would remove everthing and see if you get "drive not found" or similar message if it still hangs...

If it doesn't hang and you get a "drive not found" message we are getting somewhere 😀

BTW, CDROMs rarely work well (or at all) on PCI IDE cards. Shoddy ATAPI support. Run those on the mobo IDE.

I've gotten a Ultra 66 working on a 486 before. It took me awhile to figure out the combo of BIOS settings that made it all work out.... I couldn't even guess what they were offhand 🤣 I'd have to look.

I'm pretty sure you don't want to enable the BIOS's "PCI IDE Card" support though. That's for cards without a BIOS onboard (or BIOS disabled), and those are rare/old.

You shouldn't need to set the BIOS to boot from SCSI. The PCI IDE card's BIOS will take care of putting its IDE ports on the normal IDE resource ranges. If you aren't seeing the card's BIOS initialize during POST then you should try different PCI slots. It will detect the attached drives and say which IDE address they are on. Also, another PCI card could be conflicting if the PCI slots share resources. Sometimes PCI cards don't get along on the same INT.

Hmm just thinking about it...

My Slot 1 system with Intel BX440 chipset is only Ultra DMA 33...

So this controller is quite "recent" in Retro age...

Yup, 810 added UDMA 66 and 100 eventually. I remember IDE going from UDMA 33 to 133 in only a couple of years. UDMA 100 and 133 are practically the same. UDMA 33 is a little bit of a bottleneck but it's not a big deal on a PIII PC.

Wow, I have bee messing with stuff a bit. I can get the controller card to see the HD and it says it detected the DVD drive but DOS can't see it. DOS 6.22 FDisk detected it as 2GB which is annoying because DOS 7.1 used to detect as 8GB (actually an 80GB HDD). I couldn't find a 7.10 boot disk at the time. I am going to try some suggestions mentioned above. I am going to move the controller to PCI slot 1 and video to PCI slot 2. Will report back.

No that's good! You are almost there!

DOS 6.22 only supports FAT16. So a partition can only be 2 GB!

However you can have several partitions. E.g. on a 4GB CF card you create two 2 GB partitions and after the FORMAT you have C: and D: with 2GB each...

If you use FDISK from W95B or W98SE it will ask you if you want to enable support for larger drives (say YES) and then you can create partitions greater than 2 GB!

Using FAT32 (W95B or W98SE or later) you should be able to use larger HDDs.

I quote the user manual:

Onboard BIOS with LBA translation and Extended Int 13, supporting IDE hard
drives up to 128GB

So having a 128GB drive in a 486. Well THAT'S pretty cool 🤣

Well I found my DOS 7.10 so I am installing that. I think it is seeing my DVD drive. I plugged in to the onboard IDE2 because the HDD controller is in IDE1 on the card. Is that right?

I'll be surprised if the CDROM works perfectly on there. Ultra 66 has lots of problems with optical drives and the Ultra 100 is a similar card.

rick12373 wrote:

Well I found my DOS 7.10 so I am installing that. I think it is seeing my DVD drive. I plugged in to the onboard IDE2 because the HDD controller is in IDE1 on the card. Is that right?

Well your card has 2 IDE channels. Per channel you have a Master and Slave device.

So you can drive 4 devices off that card. The onboard controller really shouldn't be necessary.

If you jumper the HDD as master and the CD-Rom as slave they should work on the same IDE channel off a single cable.

The DVD is plugged in to the onboard and the HDD to the card. So far it seems to be working.

Excellent!

Let us know if you can partition and format the whole 80GB!

MSDOS 7.10 reports 78,129,056 kb. That's 80GB right? So just to recap the HDD is in IDE1 of the controller card and my DVD ROM is in IDE2 of the motherboard (dud that due to being told that the controller card will probably have problems with optical drives). Should the optical be in IDE1 or IDE2 of the motherboard or does it make any difference?

IDE1 might be faster. Sometimes on old boards IDE1 is the local bus controller while IDE2 runs off ISA.

It really doesn't make a difference.

Personally I try to keep the cables as neat as possible so that's usually how I organize the cables.

e.g. my Slot 1 Retro machine:

- Flopp cable
- Dual CF adapter into IDE 1
- DVDRW drive into IDE 2

Once you get it working like that you should see if you have issues with the optical drive on the PCI controller as well. If it works it would likely work a lot better.

prophase_j wrote:

Once you get it working like that you should see if you have issues with the optical drive on the PCI controller as well. If it works it would likely work a lot better.

Yeah, I'll try and do that.