ite raid pci... not recognising udma5 or cd-drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter r_d
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r_d

Hi There

I'm trying to use an ITE raid 8212 pci card to plug in some extra drives.

However, right from the boot CD drives are not recognised, while hard disks
are running at only udma2. The box says that the card can handle up to
udma5.

Any suggestions? Thanks a lot for your time.

Alistair
 
r_d said:
Hi There

I'm trying to use an ITE raid 8212 pci card to plug in some extra drives.

However, right from the boot CD drives are not recognised, while hard
disks are running at only udma2. The box says that the card can handle up
to udma5.
Click to expand...

Is it ATAPI compliant? Just because its an IDE controller doesn't mean
optical drives will work.
Any suggestions? Thanks a lot for your time.
Click to expand...

Are you using 80 wire cables? Try it in another slot?
 
Hi There

I'm trying to use an ITE raid 8212 pci card to plug in some extra drives.
Click to expand...

Which specific card?
In general, a raid card won't do ATAPI (CD/etc) drives.
That's a large part of why non-raid cards still sell.
However, some raid cards have a jumper to put them into
non-raid mode for this purpose. It might not be documented,
generic cards in particular may have spartan docs.
Sometimes a card might have a soldered-in jumper wire,
instead of a jumper pin header with the plastic "jumper" on
it. In this situation you would have to cut the jumper wire
or desolder/remove it.

It's also possible to turn some raid cards into non-raid
with a bios change, but I don't know about that chipset, you
might Google search for this.

However, right from the boot CD drives are not recognised, while hard disks
are running at only udma2. The box says that the card can handle up to
udma5.

Any suggestions? Thanks a lot for your time.
Click to expand...

Are you using 80 conductor ATA66/100/133 cables? You'll
need to, to go higher than UDMA2. Unplug the CD drives and
recheck the HDD jumpers. Once the OS has booted (and if it
is windows) you might have a Raid Manager type of
application that you can run and check or reconfigure the
ATA mode.
 
"r_d" said:
Hi There

I'm trying to use an ITE raid 8212 pci card to plug in some extra drives.

However, right from the boot CD drives are not recognised, while hard disks
are running at only udma2. The box says that the card can handle up to
udma5.

Any suggestions? Thanks a lot for your time.

Alistair
Click to expand...

http://www.iteusa.com/product_info/PC/Brief-IT8212_2.asp

It all depends on the quality of the code in the ROM
on the PCI card. The diagram on page 15 here, shows an
"extended ROM" connects to the main chip. AFAIK, the
chip itself is not fixed in function, and any anomalies
can be fixed by the extended ROM.

http://www.iteusa.com/product_info/file/pc/IT8212F_V0.4.1.pdf

Remember that the guys at ITE were rank amateurs when they
designed these parts. They had never done a hard drive interface
before. (I read some comments in one of their release notes,
where the author of the release note was proud of the fact that
he got the driver working. That is what gave me the impression
they were new to IDE.) So while the hardware might not have
any architectural limits as to what it supports, the
software/firmware support will have an impact on how well it
works.

As mentioned here, this is a "software" RAID controller, in
the sense that the hardware interface has no special support
for RAID. Just a couple ATA/ATAPI interfaces and lots of
clever firmware.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=359071
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hardware/2004-October/002010.html

I like the suggestion of trying 80 wire cables. That might help
with the UDMA problem.

But for the rest of it, I recommend using a search engine
other than Google, as people have had some strange experiences
with the 8212 in Linux/FreeBSD.

Paul
 
Hi All.

Thanks for your tips.

It turned out to be the cables. I was not aware of the difference
between them and had hard drives connected with cables designed for the
DVD.

As for the CD running on PIO and not undm2, the problem rectified
itself after uninstalling the device and restarting

r_d
 
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