Experiences with HighPoint UDMA Controllers and their drivers?

[Garet Jax]

Hello all,

I have an Abit BE6 with a HighPoint Ultra66 IDE controller. It has been giving me tons of trouble over the last two years or so with miscellaneous, impossible to recreate hangs while running Windows 98SE.

I have tried everything to stabilize it. But to no avail.

I recently installed Windows 2000 Professional on the machine with the latest HighPoint drivers from their website. The hangups have disappeared, but they have been replaced with blue screens. All the blue screens report a problem with HPT366.sys. After 10-15 seconds of displaying the blue screen, the computer reboots itself.

The next thing I am going to try is to move the HD off the UDMA 66 channel and onto a regular UDMA 33 channel. This is one thing I have never tried (even under Windows 98SE).

Has anyone else got experiences they can share regarding the High Point controllers and their drivers to try to shed a little more light on this issue?

Thanks.

 

[Garet Jax]

^

 

[RedRooster]

That's wierd, maybe your controller is on it's last legs.

Have you tried updating the HPT366 BIOS?? I remember when the BE6 came out(I used to have one) they had three or four BIOS revisions for it. I'm not sure if you can download them seperate or if they're a part of the BE6 BIOS. Update the motherboard BIOS anyways, it might help.

 

[jazz480]

I had a soyo 6ba4 motherboard and had nothing but problems with the highpoint controller especially with a mix of scsi and ide drives. The only way I could ever get the OS installed on the system was to move the ide drive back to the ata33 controller. I had to do this regardless if the scsi was hooked up or not. I tried to go full scsi with the 6ba4 but continued to have nothing but problems. I tried all the drivers that are available as well as the bios revisions that are available. No luck. I finally gave up and went with the 6ba3 and full scsi. System flies now.

 

[Garet Jax]

RedRooster2K,

The HighPoint BIOS was automatically upgraded when I upgraded the MB BIOS. I am using the latest MB BIOS. I have also installed the latest HighPoint drivers for Windows 2000.

jazz480,

That looks like what I am going to have to do too. I have sent an email to HighPoint's technical support, but haven't heard anything back yet.

Thanks for helping to both of you.

 

[Garet Jax]

Well I moved the hard drive onto the regular IDE channel and the problem seems to have disappeared. Unfortunately, it is not something I can recreate at will. As a result, there is no way for me to tell if it has really been fixed.

 

[DongTran]

disable the highpoint garbage, and go with promise if you want ultra66/100 performance. even when I was playing around with BE6 rev.2 that didn't work right all the time either.

highpoint is pure garbage. at that point, i lost hope in Abit, and went back to Asus and MSI. I love you Asus!!!

 

[metallibloke]

Looking at your rig i see your using a maxtor drive. There is a known bug with the highpoint controllers and maxtor hard drives, a timing issue i think.

This is what Maxtors website says about the issue, not quite the same symptons as you described but it may help:

Abit BE6 motherboard with a High Point controller

Description

A timing issue exists with High Point Ultra ATA-66 adapters installed on Abit BE6 and BP6 model motherboards. The issue will manifest itself with problems such as; unable to install an O/S, corrupted data, slow performance, and an inability to load drivers during boot up. Some of these problems may initially go unnoticed but then start to occur after the system has been in operation for a period of time.

(This FAQ applies to all Fireball and Bigfoot ATA hard disk drives that support Ultra ATA-66)

Answer

This issue is currently being addressed by Abit and until then Abit has published some workarounds and suggestions for the problem. Some of these are as follows:

Use the Ultra ATA-66 cables when the drives are connected to the High Point adapter. Ultra ATA-66 cables have additional ground lines which help to eliminate any line noise (crosstalk).
ATA ports 3 and 4 have their own BIOS Chip separate from the system BIOS and as a result drives connected to the High Point adapter will not show in the system BIOS.
ATA ports 1 and 2 are Ultra ATA-33 (UDMA mode 2) ports and are controlled by the system BIOS. You may use your Ultra 66 drives on them, but you won't get UDMA mode 4 (Ultra 66) performance.
Drives can be partitioned, formatted and the Operating System installed while the drive is on ATA port 1. The Ultra 66 drivers (Bus Mastering drivers) then need to be installed. The drive can then be moved to the High Point adapter.
Make sure the Ultra 66 drivers are installed in Windows. The adapters for Ultra ATA-66 are called PCI Mass Storage controllers in Device Manager under SCSI Devices.
Make sure the master/slave jumpers are set correctly. Drives connected to the Ultra ATA-66 cable will both use the Cable select (CS) jumper.
Try the drive on ATA port 4 if it won't boot on ATA port 3.
Remove any definitions (parameters) of the drive in the system BIOS when the drive is connected to the High Point adapter.
These sites have the latest BIOS and drivers for the Abit BP6 and BE6 motherboards:

www.abit.com
ftp.abit.com

Note: The High Point adapters are hard wired to IRQ 11. This is an issue which Abit is also working on.