Help! Soyo Dragon+ Need IDE 3/4 Under WinXP

[musicparadise]

I just bought a Soyo Dragon Plus for a new rig I just completed. Great board but I have one problem. I don't need RAID and want to use all 4 IDE channels for other devices. I set the motherboard jumper to disable RAID and attached a CD-RW drive to IDE 3. The manual says you have to install the Ultra Family drivers but gives no instructions on how to do this under Win XP. The drivers are also not onthe Soyo CD but I downloaded new drivers from the web site that say they are for XP. However there is an .inf file only. No instructions on what driver needs to be changed or how to install this. In other versions of windows it says there will be a yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager under Other Devices/PCI Mass Storage but that is not the case in WinXP - in fact that category isnot even there. There are no exception marks for any files but IDE 3 & 4 are not being seen. Does anyone know how to activate those channels or how to install this driver to do so?

 

[volfan]

This is funny. I just got my board going today about 2 hours ago and went through the same thing. The manual does fail in this area IMO.
1. Make sure you have the jumper on the board to set to use it as regular IDE devices.
2. Enable Raid in the BIOS. This is the part where I got lost. It comes as disabled.
3. WinXP should go through the Found New Hardware wizard. Just install the drivers from the Soyo CD here: \RAID\promise\Ultra Family Driver\Win2000
4. I installed Win2000, but it should work the same in XP
5. Let me know if that does it for you

 

[musicparadise]

Hey Volfan!

That did the trick!! I really appreciate the tip (so much so that I might even forgive the Vols for whipping the Gators down here in Florida a few weeks ago!). I diabled RAID with the motherboard jumper so it didn't make any sense to me that it should be Enabled in the BIOS. That problem and one with the Maxtor hard drive (also caused by bad documentation) were the only two sticking points I had in building this machine - but overall it went great, is fast as blazes and the Soyo looks like a great board.

 

[volfan]

Well, I'm glad it worked! Hey, you Gators have had your fun in Knoxville plenty. 😉 My board is pretty much tweaked to how I want it now, and I do love it so far.

 

[flashcadillac]

Windows XP includes drivers for support of the Ultra already...no need for the Soyo cd file.

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

Hmm, I'm trying the same thing, but I can't get past an "DISK BOOT FAILURE" message.

What I did at first was just have a CD and a HDD and installed XP; everything was fine (except for a really long boot time, but I understand that's more or less "normal" for this board).

But then I put everything in the case, attached the installed HDD to IDE1 and an unformatted HDD to IDE2 and a CDRW to IDE3 and a DVD to IDE4. Everything is jumpered as a master. I boot, it discovers the drives correctly, then the promise raid controller sees the CDRW and DVD but then I get a DISK BOOT FAILURE.

I've tried every combo I can think of WRT boot order: HDD0/1/2/3, SCSI, etc. I have my jumper set to regular IDE and my BIOS set to enable RAID.

Any ideas before I look into reinstalling?

 

[volfan]

You might try to put one of your HDD to IDE 3. I would do this:
IDE1 - HDD (OS)
IDE2 - DVD
IDE3 - HDD (Storage)
IDE4 - CDRW
Don't know if that will work, but it's the way I have mine setup.

 

[FlipSide]

moose, check your boot sequence in the bios. You may be trying to boot on another drive rather than the one on IDE1.

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

Thanks for the replies and help. No matter what I try I can't get the IDE3/4's to work. So for now I have my 2 HDD's as master/slave and my 2 CDRW's as master/slave. Not what I wanted, but at least I can load the OS and start to get updated drivers.