IDE controller card issues and data corruption.

[nebula]

Sorry this is a little lengthy, just wanted to give all the details.

I have been using a Promise Ultra100 TX2 IDE controller card for quite some time now because I needed the extra ports. I?ve only ever had a 120 gig Western Digital hooked up to it. I plugged a 180 gig WD into it last night and upon boot up, the card?s BIOS reports 167 gig, fine. When I got into Windows, Disk Manager only reported 128 gig. Actually this promise card came with the 180 gig WD but never used it. I recall seeing a specific BIOS from WD for the card if it came with the drive but I couldn?t see any reason for that since I found a BIOS for it from Promise. It flashed OK but still never used anything more than 120 gig.

I moved the 180 gig onto the mobo to get full capacity and put my two 200 gig Seagates on the controller card. Booted up XP, went to my Seagate drive to copy some data to my system drive, and when I selected the folder, it said it was corrupted!! This happened on two folders. Didn?t test them all but a few. At this same time I also was bumping my FSB up to 200 from 166 (mobileXP), silly time to do it I know. So I thought the mild OC had caused some corruption. Now I forget my actual steps but I rebooted and maybe moved some drives around, then CHKDSK came up and said ?recovering orphaned file? and stuff was going by pretty quickly. Now the two folders weren?t corrupted anymore but the stuff was broken. VDub was in there and the EXE icon was just a square window, Word wouldn?t open a couple files I had in there and the JPEGs are bunk. I forgot to check Disk Manager when the Seagates were on the card to see what size was reported. I'd like to do that to see if it's the WD and the card combo but afraid I'll lose more data.

So what actually happened? Did I lose any more data than those two folders and why? What?s wrong with the controller card? On boot up it identifies the drives OK but Windows doesn?t. I?m going to be putting the 180 gig on the same strange controller card in a different machine, will post what happens. And later today, I'm going to put a controller card that I know works with the 180 into my main system.

 

[tshock22]

Make sure xp is at least at sp1. You have to get to sp1 to see drives > 128GB correctly.

Also, back in the day i was running a cyrix chip at 166 mhz (2.5 x 66). A common overclock those days was to bump the fsb to 83 mhx and reduce the multiplier to 2, so you were still at 166 mhz (2x83). Basically, you were running your memory at a faster speed. However, you were also running your pci bus and ide interface at the faster speed, and your devices would possibly be stressed. Well, the first boot into windows started corrupting every file it touched, and being the system drive, it corrupted the registry, forcing me back to 66mhz fsb and a fresh install. I would guess that your jump in fsb caused a similar situation with your controller card, and any file you touched in that session would be damaged.

 

[nebula]

Running SP2.

But aren't the IDE/PCI busses on an NF2 chipset locked automatically? This is my first NF board but didn't see nay locking option in the BIOS. I also have PC3200 RAM so 200 FSB shouldn't be problem.

I just put the 180 gig on the Promise card in my second system, works fine. So whay doesn't it like my main system?

 

[nebula]

Solved! Put the Promise card in a different PCI slot and it worked fine. Must be something with my mobo, that card, and that slot. The Silicon Image card works fine in the "bad" slot.