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Promise Ultra ATA-100 card reading IBM 75gxp as PIO4? HELP!!

T

tjdavis1138

Senior member
Just installed my Ultra ata100 promise controller on my Epox 8k7a mb. I have had this controller card in numerous motherboards as well as another 8k7a just a few days ago and it detected the driver as udma5.

Any ideas?

I have changed cables to no avail.

 
Dumb question...I have the Maxtor version of the Promise ATA100 card - how do you know what transfer rate the detected drives are at? The nfo is not presented during bootup from the card.
 
use the IBM Feature Tool from here to check the hdd transfer mode. like sad said, win2k doesn't support ata 100 unless you have sp2 or the microsoft ata100 patch.
 
My bad, the ata100 card detects the hard drive as a pio4 on the boot-up screen before it even starts to load the os.
I do have win2k and sp2 installed.


Thanks for the link, I'll check that out. 🙂
 
tjdavis1138:

It looks like this is an issue with the Epox board and ATA100 drives. This is from the HardOCP review of the 8K7A+..


"I chose to only run this board under Windows98SE at this time due to issues Win2K has with ATA100 drives. Every drive in this test was an ATA100 unit so I felt it important to exclude Win2k at this time. I spent a considerable amount of time testing this board under Win2K only to be met with abnormal results. Apparently Microsoft is working on a fix, but the current fix makes the BIOS incorrectly state that the drives are running in PIO mode."

Now this statement is sort of confusing to me. First of all, if the motherboards BIOS and the Promise's BIOS both have a problem seeing the drive as UDMA 5, I don't understand how this would be an issue with the OS since you haven't even loaded any OS at that point. It sounds like an issue with the Epox's bios to me. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
 
To add even more to the confusion. This is my second Epox 8k7a, the first one was fried in a thunderstorm. On the first board the ata100 card detected the ibm drive as udma5 and everything was fine.

Oh well, it works fine other than that. Hopefully a new bios will correct it.
 
I was having issues, so Epox emailed me a bios update they havent released, but it is dated like 5/20. Fixed some issues I have had with my 8k7a. Email me if ya want it. (like 300k, make sure you have a sufficiently large mailbox).

Also, I think it is sweeeet how epox has the flash program built into the bios, it saves trouble and is pimp. I had never seen that before.
 
have you updated the BIOS for your promise card?

also, the motherboard's problem is independent from the promise card.
 
The newest bios I've seen on the promise site is June, 2000. I have that.

If it hadn't of worked on my old one it wouldn't bug me as much. 🙂
 
So the bios is out there? I got it like 1 wek early anyway.

Anyone else having a problem on their EPOX 8k7A and ATA 100? Mine came with a cd that had a special IDE program of some sort. I am running a IBM Deskstar 60 GXP on it. It reports the drive as a "ATA 100 SCSI HARD DRIVE" Beats me WTF a SCSI ATA 100 drive is.... but anyways it appears to be running at ATA 100 speeds. I will benchmark later and see.

Is there a free version of HDTACH or not? Otherwise all I have is SiSoft Sandra.
 
Removed all of my pci cards except for the ata100 card. This included my Sound Blaster Live value, 3com NIC, ATI Tvwonder. Reboot and the ata100 card reads the drive as udma5!! Obviously the only card I've put back in is the nic. I also moved the ata100 card to another pci slot.

Who wants to take bets that the SB Live is the guilty part here. 😉
 
Update: I put all of the cards back in one at a time and it works fine now with everything installed. 🙂

Just had to play musical pci slots for a while.
 
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