Adding ATA 133 Controller Card

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael L. Coleman
  • Start date Start date
M

Michael L. Coleman

Need Hardware Wizard

I am not a hardware guru, but have built a few PC's. I have a Dell
Dimension 8100 with onboard controller, one 40 GB HDD, CD-ROM, DVD
burner and IOMEGA ZIP drive (total of four devices the max for my
onboard controller). I wanted to add a second fast hard drive for DVD
burning (very disappointed in DVD burning speed, but that's another
story). I bought a MAXTOR 40 GB drive and a SIIG ATA 133 PCI
controller card. I put the card in and installed the driver for it.
It shows up in the Device Manager as a SCSI controller. I connected
the new MAXTOR drive to the ATA 133 card by itself, but cannot get the
PC to see the new drive. I have tried different slots, tried running
the new drive as master, slave, cable select....no good. The SIIG
card has several jumpers (1) one that changes the card from PCI to
RAID.....tried both. Also jumper for primary and secondary channel.
Not sure what they are for, but they came without jumpers installed.
I have scoured the USENET and found that most people recommend fooling
the PC by making the bios boot from SCSI. I cannot find that option
on my PC. One option I am considering is canning the IOMEGA ZIP, and
adding the new MAXTOR to the onboard controller. Am I giving up too
easy? Any advice is welcome.


Mike Coleman
 
I no longer have the Promise Ultra100 card in my box so this is from
memory.

By installing the driver, for which operating system? 95-based Windows
or NT-based Windows? For NT-based Windows (Windows NT4/2000/XP), you
have to install the driver while the hard drive is still attached to the
IDE ports on your motherboard. Otherwise, the OS won't know anything
about the controller card and so it won't be able to find your hard
drives. When you install Windows 2000, a prompt says to hit F6 if you
later need to load a SCSI driver (which includes the IDE controller
card). If you forget to hit F6, later you will see a message that no
mass storage devices were found. If you reboot using the Windows 2000
CD to run Repair then again you must have a floppy ready and hit F6 to
load the driver. If you reboot into Recovery Console mode, again you
need that driver floppy. It's a real pain. Maybe someone has a trick
to put it on the hard drive to find it from there, but obviously it
cannot be on a drive that is on the IDE controller card since the OS
cannot find that drive until the driver gets loaded. If, however, you
are using DOS- or 95-based Windows, can you see the hard drives attached
to the IDE controller card when you press F8 to boot into raw DOS-only
mode?

If you want to *boot* from any hard drive attached to the IDE controller
card, you must remove all hard drives from the motherboard's IDE ports.
The motherboard's BIOS will first look for hard drives on the
motherboard's IDE port; if a hard drive is found there then the MBR will
try to read the boot sector off of one of those hard drives. So move
all your hard drives to the IDE controller card and leave the CD devices
back on the motherboard's IDE ports. Since you've moved the hard drives
onto the IDE controller card and freed up the motherboard's IDE ports,
and if you have 2 CD devices, then put them on separate motherboard IDE
ports as masters. Same for the hard drives on the IDE controller card;
if you have 2 hard drives, put them on different IDE ports on the
controller card.

Make sure you use the 80-wire/40-pin ribbon cables to attach the hard
drives to the IDE controller card. If you use the old 40-wire/40-pin
ribbon cables, the IDE ports will only support up to Ultra DMA-33. You
need the 80-wire/40-pin ribbon cables to support Ultra DMA-66 and
higher.

I have only use a couple Zip drives but that was a couple years ago.
When CD-R[W] got affordable, I tossed the Iomega drives. I don't know
if the Zip drive supports better than Ultra DMA-33. If not then leave
it on the motherboard IDE ports along with the CD drives (which do not
support greater than Ultra DMA-33), but leave the CD devices on separate
IDE ports, if possible.

During the bootup sequence and after the POST, you should see a screen
message showing the BIOS got loaded for the IDE controller card.
Actually all you might see is what drives got detected on that
controller card. At this point, you should be able to hit a key to
enter the setup/BIOS screens for that controller card. I'd have to
wander off to the manufacturer's web site to see what options were
available so, for now, just hunt around to see if something obvious pops
out at you. I know, for example, that for my Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI
host controller card that its BIOS can be disabled if none of the hard
drives attached to it will be used for booting the machine (it will also
disable its BIOS automatically if no hard drives are attached an only
devices like driver-supported drives (CD-ROM, DVD-ROM), printers, and
tape drives are attached; no hard drives attached so no need to load the
BIOS, especially since there will be no RAID).

Oh, and although it sounds dumb, make sure pin 1 of the ribbon cable
goes to pin 1 on the IDE port and to pin 1 on the hard drive.
 
Michael L. Coleman said:
Need Hardware Wizard

I am not a hardware guru, but have built a few PC's. I have a Dell
Dimension 8100 with onboard controller, one 40 GB HDD, CD-ROM, DVD
burner and IOMEGA ZIP drive (total of four devices the max for my
onboard controller). I wanted to add a second fast hard drive for DVD
burning (very disappointed in DVD burning speed, but that's another
story). I bought a MAXTOR 40 GB drive and a SIIG ATA 133 PCI
controller card. I put the card in and installed the driver for it.
It shows up in the Device Manager as a SCSI controller. I connected
the new MAXTOR drive to the ATA 133 card by itself, but cannot get the
PC to see the new drive. I have tried different slots, tried running
the new drive as master, slave, cable select....no good. The SIIG
card has several jumpers (1) one that changes the card from PCI to
RAID.....tried both. Also jumper for primary and secondary channel.
Not sure what they are for, but they came without jumpers installed.
I have scoured the USENET and found that most people recommend fooling
the PC by making the bios boot from SCSI. I cannot find that option
on my PC. One option I am considering is canning the IOMEGA ZIP, and
adding the new MAXTOR to the onboard controller. Am I giving up too
easy? Any advice is welcome.
Click to expand...

That's the problem with buying proprietry systems like Dell, they don't give
you options for non-(Dell)standard hardware. Hence the no "Boot from SCSI"
option in BOIS.

Unless I missed it, you didn't mention what OS you're running. XP should
'see' the HDD attached to the card, 9x may have problems and I'm not
familiar with 2K.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.
 
Michael said:
Need Hardware Wizard

I am not a hardware guru, but have built a few PC's. I have a Dell
Dimension 8100 with onboard controller, one 40 GB HDD, CD-ROM, DVD
burner and IOMEGA ZIP drive (total of four devices the max for my
onboard controller). I wanted to add a second fast hard drive for DVD
burning (very disappointed in DVD burning speed, but that's another
story). I bought a MAXTOR 40 GB drive and a SIIG ATA 133 PCI
controller card. I put the card in and installed the driver for it.
It shows up in the Device Manager as a SCSI controller. I connected
the new MAXTOR drive to the ATA 133 card by itself, but cannot get the
PC to see the new drive.
Click to expand...

The PC doesn't see it or windows doesn't see it? When booting these cards
ussually have a "boot screen" which says 'press -blank- to enter setup' for
the card itself. Also most show them autodetecting the drive connected to
them. Does it get this far detecting the drive connected to it? If the card
doesn't see the drive, you might try no jumper as some drives/controllers
don't want any jumper if used as a single..

Your board might not boot from a PCI card controller but I'd be shocked if
it wouldn't as even some pentium 1 systems I've used these types of cards
will. If not you may have to use your other drive conected to the on board
controller for your "system" drive and use the other for storage/speed. To
get any real speed out of this new drive you do need ata100 or 133, 80 wire
cable and DMA enabled to get the most out of it.
 
Need Hardware Wizard

I am not a hardware guru, but have built a few PC's. I have a Dell
Dimension 8100 with onboard controller, one 40 GB HDD, CD-ROM, DVD
burner and IOMEGA ZIP drive (total of four devices the max for my
onboard controller). I wanted to add a second fast hard drive for DVD
burning (very disappointed in DVD burning speed, but that's another
story). I bought a MAXTOR 40 GB drive and a SIIG ATA 133 PCI
controller card. I put the card in and installed the driver for it.
It shows up in the Device Manager as a SCSI controller. I connected
the new MAXTOR drive to the ATA 133 card by itself, but cannot get the
PC to see the new drive. I have tried different slots, tried running
the new drive as master, slave, cable select....no good. The SIIG
card has several jumpers (1) one that changes the card from PCI to
RAID.....tried both. Also jumper for primary and secondary channel.
Not sure what they are for, but they came without jumpers installed.
I have scoured the USENET and found that most people recommend fooling
the PC by making the bios boot from SCSI. I cannot find that option
on my PC. One option I am considering is canning the IOMEGA ZIP, and
adding the new MAXTOR to the onboard controller. Am I giving up too
easy? Any advice is welcome.


Mike Coleman
Click to expand...

I have one of those SIIG ATA133 PCI controller cards, found nothing
particularly unusual about it's use. You are aware that one of the
pin headers is just the output for the LED, that it should NEVER have
a jumper on them? The first jumper on mine is for RAID support, but
mine isn't a changable jumper, is hard-wired "on". The second jumper
location on mine doesn't have the pins installed, so is permanently
"off", the function is "Base Address 5 Enable". I'm unsure exactly
what it is, but a SIIG document I read mentioned that it should never
be needed (whatever that means, I know mine works fine without it).

Your system is P4 based, right? It has to have a minimum of ATA100 on
the onboard IDE controller, which will yield higher performance that
this SIIG add-on card. Even though the add-on card is ATA133, it's
running over the PCI bus, so it's always going to be slower than the
integrated southbridge IDE controller. If I were you I would jumper
the SIIG card for non-RAID mode and hook the IOMEGA ZIP and CDROM
drives up to it. If you jumper the card for RAID you may need then
enter the configuration screen (which may be a simple text-based setup
opposed to the fancy menu on cards like Promise) and configure the
drive as a single stripe or span (whichever, preferribly a span, will
allow it to be moved/removed from the SIIG card at a later date and
used normally), but again you dont' need to set the card as a RAID
card at all, so it may be better not to.

Perhaps it's a silly question, but did you partition and format your
new hard drive?

There is likely a setting in your BIOS to allow booting from the SIIG
card, but perhaps it's awkwardly or generically worded so it's
difficult to identify. However, you definitely do not need to boot
the new HDD from the SIIG IDE add-on card for Windows to see it.


Dave
 
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