HELP! Promise ATA/133 card won't recognize new hard drive!

[WAZ]

My brother is running an older system -- Pentium II with an Intel BX board (mfd around 1999, I think). He bought a new 80-GB hard drive, only to find his motherboard was too old (and there are no BIOS upgrades newer than 2000) to support such a large, new hard drive. So he bought a new Promise ATA/133 PCI card and hooked his drives up to that.

His original hard drive -- a 13-GB Quantum -- is recognized fine. Windows is installed on that one and boots up normally. But the new 80-GB HDD (slave, via jumpers and cable hookup) does not show up. He has updated the drivers, it shows up fine in system properties, etc. We even upgraded to Win98 SE, as we read you need at least SE to use a 32+ GB HDD. Everything should work.... yet for some reason, his system won't detect it.

Any help would be great. Thanks!

 

[Budman]

Did you connect the 80wire connector in the right order?

Blue to board(or card) grey to slave & black to master.

If that dont work then try jumper it to CS (cable select)

 

[bagaki]

have you created a partition on the drive yet? i know that if you drop a new drive into a computer and dont make a partition on it, it will not display.

"it shows up fine in system properties" - are you referring to the drive or the ata controller card?


bagaki

 

[KKiller]

I had a similar problem. Is your HD a western digital?

 

[Budman]

"it shows up fine in system properties" - are you referring to the drive or the ata controller card?

Yes i was wondering about that too.

If the drive shows up in there then all you need to do is what bagaki said,partition it.

 

[WAZ]

Ok, to answer the questions...

Yeah, the cable is connected correctly. We also tried setting it to CS, but it still wouldn't show up.

We did partition and format the drive.

The ATA card shows up fine in System Properties, but the hard drive does not show up at all. Under "Disk Drives", there's his original Quantum hard drive, his floppy, and his ZIP... but no new one.

And the new one is not a WD, but a Maxtor. Sorry.

Any other ideas why it wouldn't be showing up? Thanks!

 

[WAZ]

In a recent development, we found that the new drive doesn't even show up under FDISK anymore.

When he first got the drive, FDISK worked fine -- but the drive was plugged into the motherboard's IDE port.

Now that it's plugged into the Promise controller, FDISK reports "No fixed disk found". We even disconnected the old drive completely, set the NEW one to master, and connected the new one with the black connector, as if it were the only (and master) drive. But FDISK still wouldn't detect it.

When the old drive is plugged in to the Promise controller, however, FDISK detects it fine.

I hope this update helps hunt down a solution... Thanks again.

 

[WAZ]

bump

 

[bagaki]

did you do a clean install of winME when you installed the card?

also, when you boot - do you get the promise ata/133 display (i dont know the technical term, but like when the computer posts) and if so, does it display the hdd when booting?

 

[WAZ]

No, we haven't done a clean install of Windows... The Promise BIOS does display during the boot process, and it says "looking for drives". But then it only detects the one drive and goes on to start up Windows on it. Like I said, even when we disconnect the old one, set the NEW one to Master, and plug it in with the black connector as the only hard drive, it will still not be detected. FDISK doesn't even recognize it anymore. So the drive is actually unrecognized before it even gets to Windows.

Now, hooked up to the motherboard's IDE ports, I can understand it not showing up -- it's an old BIOS (still the newest available), and it doesn't recognize large drives. But a brand new Promise ATA 133 card? There's no reason the new drive shouldn't work on it. I've also emailed Promise tech support, but have heard NOTHING back from them.

Thanks for the replies.... any other ideas?

 

[Pabster]

The only thing that jumps to mind is that you must have the Promise controller in a busmastering PCI slot. Older mainboards often only supported bus masters on 1 or 2 PCI slots. Try switching to a different slot.

 

[bagaki]

i would try a clean install of your OS, especially if you are running the harddrive with the OS off of the promise card. I had a similiar problem with win2K when i installed my promise ata/100 card(although the only time the hdd was not displayed was in windows, it displayed fine at the boot). i know atleast with win2k that during the install i had to specify the drivers for the ata/100 card and use the supplied disk. i am unsure how you would do that with a winME install, but there should be a way. after i formatted and reinstalled everything worked splended

bagaki