P4C800-E Deluxe suddenly refuses to recognize ONLY Maxtor HD's!!

computer

Platinum Member
Nov 5, 2000
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Here's a new one on me. Has anyone ever heard of a mobo suddenly not recognizing only one brand of HD??

Here's a bit of the history. I use an 80gb/8mb/7200rpm ATA133 Maxtor as a storage HD. It was connected to the Promise 378 controller on this mobo. (The Promise controller on this mobo consists of ONE ATA133 IDE and two SATA ports that can be stand-alone or RAID).

Some months back, the Promise BIOS would not always recognize the Maxtor HD. Sometimes it would fine, other times it said nothing was connected and I'd have to cont-alt-del or 'reset' a few times for it to show up. Shortly after that, I got some of those Rosewill converter boards that convert IDE to SATA and I used on those on it with no problems as all.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been extensively testing two WD740ADFD Raptors on the Promise controller (to see which of them was fastest). At first I had only one hooked up, then I thought testing both at the same time (as IDE, NOT RAID) would make more sense. I had no issues with this.

Yesterday I removed both Raptors and hooked the Maxtor HD back up, and no problems. All was working as usual. Then today when I booted up my PC, when I came back in the room I noticed it had hung on the blue XP startup screen that has that progress indicator bar at the bottom and the bar WAS active, NOT stuck, going left right, left right, etc. WTF?? :Q It just stayed there so I had to do a "reset".

I did not notice at this time if the Promise BIOS screen said it found the drive or not. When it got into XP, to my amazement I was presented with the "Found new hardware wizard"!!! Again, WTF???? :roll: I realized it was wanting to install drivers for a NEW PROMISE component! A NEW ONE mind you. It was a "Promise console SCSI processor device". Once again, WTF?? :shocked: LOL. This has NEVER been installed on this PC before, I've never even seen it before!! Yet, it just shows up! There's only supposed to be one entry in the Device Manager for this controller, and I forget what it's supposed to be by default, but since installing the new Promise (NOT Asus) drivers, it's shown as "WinXP Promise SATA150 TX Series IDE controller". (Similar to what it's always show @POST, "SATA150 TX2 Plus", hence the reason I tried those newer drivers). No, this is NOT a driver issue, remember, the drives are not seen @POST in the Promise BIOS.

XP didn't want to install ANY drivers I had for the Promise controller for this new device, and it couldn't find any on the HD. Several times I removed it from the DM and restarted and it kept showing up. Ok, so evidently I'm going to have install drivers for it, so let XP find the drivers from the Update Site and it did. So that got rid of this new yellow ? in the DM. In addition to what I normally had there in the DM for the controller now has a new entry with it: "Promise RAID console". I restart, still no HD found on the controller!

What's going on, is the HD bad, or the controller bad.....did the controller fry the HD or vice-versa, or is the IDE > SATA adapter bad??? So to try and answer these questions I removed the converter board and hooked the Maxtor up with its IDE connector. Still nothing. So then I hook it up the vacant NATIVE SEC IDE controller....NOTHING!! Coincidence? Both the HD bad AND the Promise controller bad?? Apparently not: I hooked up a Samsung HD (80gb/2mb/7200rpm/ATA100) to the Promise controller with AND WITHOUT the converter board and the mobo never saw it. That's using the controller's IDE port, and one of the SATA ports with the converter board. Neither worked. I then hooked it up to the Native SEC IDE controller and there it was, it showed up!! A WD1600JB also worked on the Native controller. Ok.......hmmmmmmm.....WTF?? (Ok, that Samsung HD also WILL NOT work in any external enclosure I've tried, nor with one of those IDE to USB adapters. So maybe that's a quirk of this Samsung HD only working with straight IDE. However, it didn't work on the IDE Promise port). So then I hook up a SATA Raptor to one of the PROMISE SATA ports, and, it WORKED! No problem seeing it in the Promise BIOS.

Therefore, what I have is a mobo that will see NO IDE DRIVES connected to the Promise IDE connector. It will see SATA drives hooked up the Promise SATA connector, but NOT an IDE drives connected to the SATA connector using the converter board!! I tried TWO converter boards. It will see IDE WD and Samsung HD's on the Native IDE connector, but NOT TWO identical Maxtor 80gb/8mb/7200rpm/ATA133 drives! BOTH of these drives are FINE, they work in an firewire box!!

Why would this mobo suddenly refuse to acknowledge the existence of two perfectly working identical Maxtor HD's on neither the Promise nor Native controller, yet has no problem with Samsung or WD IDE drives on the Native controller, nor any problem with Raptor SATA drives on the Promise controller.....and what does this have to do with the new Promise hardware found?

Delirious and confused.....

Thanks.

EDIT: A couple things I left out; right now my MAIN HD is a Maxtor, but it's a 250gb/16mb/7200rpm ATA133, and obviously the mobo has no issue with it. (It's temp until I install the WD740ADFD).

Also, when I started testing the ADFD drives, I had disconnected my CDROM drive because I didn't want to tax the PSU with 4 HD's. When I boot, it beeps and says "SEC slave device not ATAPI compatible". !!! I HAVE NO SEC SLAVE DEVICE hooked up!!! All I have are stand alone master drives! It's always been that way!

I think my mobo has had an aneurysm. :roll:
 

pugster

Junior Member
Nov 29, 2006
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Sometimes internal ATA cards are referred as scsi controllers because it uses not a native ATA controller in the controller.

Another thing with hard drives is that sometimes they seem to be working but they would not, and won't be detected by the bios.

Last thing I would check is the power supply. I admit that I have purchased cheap (free after rebate) power supplies and all sorts of quirky problems happens if there's not enough power. You won't notice right away but some of your devices won't work properly if it does not have enough power, hard drives included.
 

computer

Platinum Member
Nov 5, 2000
2,735
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Originally posted by: pugster
Sometimes internal ATA cards are referred as scsi controllers because it uses not a native ATA controller in the controller.
Yeah, I knew that. ;) I'm not using any "cards", the Promise controller is the 3rd-party integrated controller.

Another thing with hard drives is that sometimes they seem to be working but they would not, and won't be detected by the bios.
But these Maxtors work in external enclosures. I can understand one going bad (the one I was using) but not both of them.

Last thing I would check is the power supply. I admit that I have purchased cheap (free after rebate) power supplies and all sorts of quirky problems happens if there's not enough power. You won't notice right away but some of your devices won't work properly if it does not have enough power, hard drives included.
Even though it's an expensive Enermax, because it's only 465w is why I disconnected my optical drives. And like I said, the Raptors were disconnected and the mobo still can't see the Maxtor drives. All the PSU was powering drive wise was the main HD and the Maxtors, one at a time.