Promise ATA100 controller + ATA266 = death

  • Thread starter Thread starter Adk46er
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Adk46er

I'm doing a post-mortem (almost) of my system. Maybe somebody out
there can explain what happened.

My system has 4 drives - all full -- BTW when TF are mobo makers gonna
add more drive capability -- anyway, I needed to add another HDD
because I've begun doing a lot of work with movie production.

So I plug in an old Promise Ultra100 TX2 card in an empty slot. I
attach my new Seagate 120 gig hdd to it and reboot.

First problem. I notice that my 2 cd drives are no longer seen in the
boot up sequence. I have them 2 set to "auto" in the bios and it's
worked flawlessly until now. Ultimately the boot sequence says "no
drives found" on the secondary channel.

So then the promise bios starts and it detects the card fine as well
as the hdd. Then WinXP Pro begins and man.... is it ever a slug! I'm
like waiting 4 maybe 5X as long as I used to.

When it finally is finished, I check WIndows explorer and see the two
CDroms. (How can this be when the mobo didn't?) When I open up one of
the drives to see if it's reading a file on the disk in it ... kaboom
.... instant death. Crash to the basement floor with no stops in
between.

So I wait for it to reboot and go to windows again. I click to close
windows down. Guess what?! It won't. Total freeze at the "windows is
closing" pic.

So... simple answer to all this, right? Just remove the card and sell
the new drive on ebay, right? So I pull the card and reboot. Guess
what ... it's still a slug. and bios still won't recognize my 2 cdrom
drives and WinXP still crashes when I try to open up these 2 drives,
and it still won't shut down.

Dammit. Why can't I ever learn that if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Any suggestions?
 
I got one of these cards with my new WD 160 GB drive. When I installed it,
I had all kinds of problems with it. The drive would constantly loose the
secondary partition. I downloaded a BIOS update from the Promise site and
it's worked great since.
 
I'm doing a post-mortem (almost) of my system. Maybe somebody out
there can explain what happened.
Click to expand...

<snip>

Have you checked to make sure you haven't introduced a virus into your
system through some means?

Just because you have empty bus slots does not mean the system has enough
free hardware interrupts to handle them.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can put 5 IDE hard
drives in a system even with a Promise card in the mix.

If you have the $$$ consider replacing your existing drives with a pair of
250 gig drives. That should provide ample storage for the immediate future.

Just some thoughts...
 
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can put 5 IDE hard
drives in a system even with a Promise card in the mix.
Click to expand...
I've had six up and running in a single system before using this same
controller. Two on the MB primary and two on each channel of the IDE
expansion card. I put my CDR and DVD on the MB secondary channel. You need
to be sure your power supply and cooling scheme will support this many
drives.
 
OK, you asked so I'll oblige... YES, you can put more than 4 IDE drives in
a system without issue. Basically, PCI slots/resources will be your
limiting factor. With my P4B533-E I have had 6 HD's and 2 ATAPI drives all
running together without issue, and that was with only integrated IDE
channels on the MB. With a couple add-in PCI controller cards, and a very
large power supply, you could keep adding drives.
 
I skriblet screwtape
iii noe ala dette
Just because you have empty bus slots does not mean the system has
enough free hardware interrupts to handle them.
Click to expand...

Shouldn't be a problem on realtively new systems - anyway, the harddrives
don't demand separate interrupts, although the controller card might.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can put 5 IDE
hard drives in a system even with a Promise card in the mix.
Click to expand...

Of course you can - given enough power in the box, you can install as many
controller cards as there are room (ie. vacant PCI-slots) and attach HD's
to your heart's content - only problem being already mentioned power,
perhaps heat-issues, and finally the genius limit in Windows to 26
(actually 24 for things other than floppies) drive-letters :-/

But having 5, 6, or even 8 drives in a box at the same time is no problem
at all.
 
You can run with alot more drives than 4 ide drives, im running 4x250 and
4x120 2x36 2xcdrw = 12 ide drives, allmost no problem !

Promise are a shit ass company that dont support nothing but the basics.

if your motherboard cant find disk after you put in the controller then the
controller is possibly conflicting with the mb, move the tx2 card further
down the pci slots maybe to the last one.

i had to try all pci slots before i got my system working (mb controller
+promise sx4000 +tx2) and i had to try alot of combinations before it worked
flawlessly.

you can also try assigning IRQ directly to the board (you do that in the
bios, if it supports it)
update mb bios, and your tx2 controller to the latest, and remember drivers
update them too

then to your powersupply, a harddisk uses a little less than 1 amp at 12
volts =12 watts per drive, if you have a regular 300w psu...then it has
around 12amps all in all....and depending on ram, cpu, theres is usually not
much left for other stuff than 2 hd and 2 cd rom.

remember that a cpu can eat as much as 80-100 watts, ram about 12-20w per
module, harddrives 12w, cd rom probably about the same if not more.

make shure you have a good airflow, your disk temperature should not exceed
50c !

Lasse
 
Hey everybody.... thanks for the tips. You've given me some options I
hadn't thought of.

Fortunately I have GoBack on my system, so I reverted the whole shmeer
to the day before. Now Windows is acting normal (well, as normal as it
could anyway)

I think maybe I'll go with Firewire external drives from this point
on. They're twice as expensive, but man do they save hassles, and
they're self-powered so I don't have to update my powersupply.

Thanks again.
 
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