PCI ATA-100 Card and Hard Drive Upgrade

[blahsome]

Hi, I'm new here so if this is not the correct forum to post the question, please let me know.

I just purchased a Maxtor ATA-100 45GB hard drive with its ATA-100 PCI adapter card. However, I'm confused as to what's going to happen to my system. I already have two hard drives (PM and PS), and two cd-rom drives (SM and SS) occupying the four EIDE channels (they seem to be plugged directly into an on-board controller???).

So can I just plug in the PCI card and connect my new hard drive to it such that I have three hard drives in one PC? (If this is the case, what's going to happen to the drive letter assignment? Who's the C drive? I'd like to have the new Maxtor drive as C.)

Or, must I get rid of one of my old hard drives? And what should I do to the remaining old drive--leaving it alone or migrating it to the new PCI card as well?

Sorry, there are a lot of questions here and I hope you can understand what I meant. Thanks in advance for your help, and please do tell me if this is the wrong forum.

 

[Shanteli]

Ok, well in the BIOS you have to remember to have the computer boot from "SCSI" instead of C,D,A,or CD-ROM...setting it to SCSI will let the comp see your PCI UDMA100 controller and boot from whatever is Primary Master on your controller card. Depending on your controller, it will either have autodetect features to detect your maxtor HDD or perhaps you can hotkey to configure it. I have the Ultra100 Promise controller and it autodetected everything, so pretty much that is it...if you set the comp to boot from SCSI, whatever is the promary master on the controller card will be designated C drive and then it will push all of your other hard drives/CD-Rom drives down a notch. Hope it helps.

 

[blahsome]

Thanks, Shanteli!

If I'm not mistaken, I remember seeing a post about Maxtor Ultra-100 really being a promise card. So hopefully it'll do the same auto-detect thing for my system as well.

Also, right now I don't see a SCSI boot option in my BIOS. I assume it'll appear when it detects that such a card is plugged in? (The four options I have right now are: Removable Devices, ATAPI CD-ROM, Hard Drive, and Network Boot.)

 

[Shanteli]

You don't have a SCSI option aye? Humm then I suppose try Network Boot then if that doesn't work, choose the removable devices. But if you really think about it you have to boot with a boot disk 1st in order to partition, format, and get an OS onto your new hard drive....then you try to get the comp to boot w/ your controller.

 

[XeonTux]

Worst case scenario you could place a boot manager in the mbr of the old hard drive.

 

[TH]

I don't have a boot from SCSI option either - no problem. Remove your HDD's from the Primary connector and connect them directly to the controller card. Leave the primary slot empty. It works for me.