I think my IDE controller died

[JediJeb]

I have an HP Kayak PII450 that is used to control some analytical equipment at work. Yesterday it stopped booting so we figured it was the drive gone bad. Put in a new drive and went to install WinNT but it won't read the CD now. Put in new CD drive and still nothing. BIOS recognizes new HD and old HD along with both CD's we tried. When booting to the CD the access light flashes on power up but once the POST screen is gone the light never flashes again and the No Operating System Detected error shows up. If set to boot to either HD same error appears. When able to boot to an emergency recovery NT floppy it boots but when trying to switch to c: I get invalid drive error.

I believe I have lost the onboard IDE controller, but I want some other opinions. Can't just go buy another comp because the interface card for the equipment is ISA ALso have to use NT because the software just refuses to work with W2K or XP . Have another similar piece of equipment that is stuck on Win95 and gotta get the most I can out of them because they cost about 70K to replace. Any help would be appreciated.

I am hoping that if it is the IDE controller I can use a PCI IDE controller to get around it for now. Would a Promise Ultra 100 TX2 be bootable without the onboard controller working?

 

[LTC8K6]

If the onboard IDE controller is bad, how is the BIOS recognizing the drives?

Yes, a PCI card is a cheap solution to a bad onboard IDE controller and it should boot okay.

 

[JediJeb]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
If the onboard IDE controller is bad, how is the BIOS recognizing the drives?

That's exactly what I was thinking, but then I have seen weirder things happen. Could it be something in the firmware is corrupted so that it can read the information but not transfer data?

 

[LTC8K6]

Check the memory. You can run memtest86, or just pull out sticks of ram one at a time and do a little swapping and see if the problem goes away.

 

[Zepper]

If you end up needing a new controller, be sure to look at the LSI. It is SiliconImage based and is much more flexible than most others - don't worry about the fact it is called a Mega-RAID card. It will run just about any IDE device in normal mode too.
.bh.

 

[JediJeb]

bump

 

[xgsound]

Here is something to try. (pardon my NT ignorance) In win98 this can happen when a disk error happens, and sets a noide bit somewhere. The fix is to look for noide in the registry and remove it in win98.

I'm not familiar with how NT archives this type (? registry,hive?) of info, perhaps a google search including NT and noide will
get you somewhere.

Jim