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Msi Bx Master and Promise ATA66 issues (IRQ?)

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First post, by Nemo1985

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Hello, It's 2 days i'm fighting against that mb since I swapped the hard drive.
I have been using a Maxtor 80gb hard drive with windows 98 freshly installed using the integrated "scsi" Promise ATA66 without issues, suddenly the hdd died and I had to use another one, I installed windows 98 SE once again but as soon I install the Promise ata66 driver if the hard drive is connected to the ata66 it stops booting with flashing cursor.
I realized it could be an IRQ issue, the mb has 6 pci slots, I'm using a Geforce4 MX440 as video card and the Sb audigy in the fourth pci slot as audio card.
I tried to take off the sound card but the problem still persists (I noticed that the promise and sb audigy shares the same irq, I tried to mess up with pci\pnp configuration on the bios but without any results.
On the other hand if I switch to the 440bx controller windows boots fine and both sound card and promise controller are both enabled.

This is the actual situation (with the hard drive connected to the bx controller):

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Thanks in advance for any help

Reply 1 of 7, by swaaye

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Try the Promise card in every slot and run it with only video card. It's not uncommon for PCI cards to cause this kind of problem. You may be able to find a happy arrangement. This is why I usually just run the motherboard's IDE ports.

Reply 3 of 7, by The Serpent Rider

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Change IRQ in Windows? Also enable "PNP OS installed" option. Maybe OS can sort it out without your intervention.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 4 of 7, by Nemo1985

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I will try that, but now I also noticed that after the windows trouble the hard drive is detected from the bios but not from any os, in fact it says there is no bootable device, if I turn off and on the pc, it works again.
I'm wondering is it possible that there is an incompatibility between the hard drive and the promise card?

Reply 5 of 7, by zyga64

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Can you enter in to Promise controler BIOS at start-up ? I think you should.
Maybe it's worth to try different drivers ?
I don't remember exactly if Promise controllers also needs paired BIOS/Driver (same major version). Highpoint ones definitely needs this.

1) VLSI SCAMP /286@20 /4M /CL-GD5422 /CMI8330
2) i420EX /486DX33 /16M /TGUI9440 /GUS+ALS100+MT32PI
3) i430FX /K6-2@400 /64M /Rage Pro PCI /ES1370+YMF718
4) i440BX /P!!!750 /256M /MX440 /SBLive!
5) iB75 /3470s /4G /HD7750 /HDA

Reply 6 of 7, by Nemo1985

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No, there is no way to access the bios:

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Also the weird thing is that everything was working fine with the very same configuration but the 80gb hard drive, I will try another hard drive later...

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-02-21, 05:39:

Change IRQ in Windows? Also enable "PNP OS installed" option. Maybe OS can sort it out without your intervention.

I tried to enable the option in the bios but it didn't work, same problem, windows won't let me change the irq, it says it cannot be changed, maybe in safe mode?

I also tried another hdd, 80 gb like the first one that was dead, but I'm having the same issue, so the 120gb hard drive is not the problem.

Reply 7 of 7, by Nemo1985

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I solved the issue, mainly thanks to a Phil's video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L-mLCk-CFM) he found there were some issues with some hard drives, I bought and get an hard drive that was the same as the one died and everything works like a charme...

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