Maxtor ATA100 controller and Maxtor 30BG ATA100 HDD *****Need HELP**

[Sundog]

I think the new HDD is bad, here is what I tried.

On an Epox EP-58VP3A, I installed a new maxtor ata100 controller and new maxtor ata100 30GB HDD. CD-Rom was secondary master on the mobo's built in controller with all others listed as none in the BIOS.

Using a win98SE boot disk, I fdisked the HDD to a 10GB partition and set it to active. Rebooted, then formatted using using the /u /s switches.

Loaded win98SE from cd-rom, rebooted and then loaded the maxtor ata100 drivers, rebooted, then loaded the win98 shutdown patch, rebooted, then NOTHING. Just a blank screen. Did a hard boot, and it started in safe mode. I ran msconfig and selected it to start in diagnostic mode, rebooted , NOTHING.

Will not boot, put in the win98SE boot disk and it tells me that there is no FAT partition on the drive (WTF!)

So I partition again, reboot, and it tells me that there is no FAT partition on the drive. :|

READ THIS! I forgot to mention that up until I ran the win98se shutdown patch, the HDD showed up on the controller card BIOS as a UDMA 5. After all of these probs, it shows up as PIO 4.

I have tried different ATA66/100 cables, and the controller in different PCI slots. Nothing.

I'm thinking a bad hard drive!! What do you think?

 

[Edski]

If that is a retail drive, you should have gotten a floppy disk with it. Boot to the floppy and and run maxdiag or powermax (which ever one is on the floppy). If you have to, boot to your 9x boot disk then put the maxtor disk in and run which ever program is there. If it passes all 3 tests, it is probably not the hard drive causing your problems.

 

[Edski]

DAMN dp

 

[Sundog]

If I run Powermax, it says that no HDDs are installed. It does not read the HDD through the PCI controller. Are you saying that I should take the HDD off of the PCI controller and onto the onboard mobo ata33 controller?

 

[Sundog]

^

 

[bacillus]

before considering the drive bad, try installing your OS with the hdd attached to the m/board ide. install the pci card & drivers with nothing attached then attach the hdd to the controller card. don't forget to change boot order in bios to take account of the fact that the pci card is treated as scsi so you need an order such as floppy>scsi etc .
good luck.

 

[Sundog]

Will try that this morning.

 

[Edski]

The software should have seen the drive on the card, you might have a bad card. Hook the drive to the mobo ide and see if the software can see the drive. Make sure to set your bios to all auto on the channel that you hook the drive to.

 

[Sundog]

UPDATE: OK this is weird.

Everything is working now, ALL I did was update the mobo bios. The controller card sees the drive as UDMA 5, instead of PIO4. And could access the drive and loaded everything just fine.

I just don't get how updating the mobo bios effected the controller card bios. ???