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Two PCI IDE controllers in one machine

O

OVerLoRDI

Diamond Member
So for almost a year now I have had windows xp pro running happily with 4 hard drives connected via a Promise Ultra133 TX2. Recently I needed more storage so I decided to move some of my other IDE hard drives into this computer. But with the Motherboard's IDE channels full and the Promise 133 full I attempted to add yet another PCI IDE controller card, this time a Promise Ultra100 TX2. Put both cards in, connected the hard drives and loaded up. The controller's cards bios's loaded perfectly and detected all the drives and windows loaded up. Here is where things go wrong. I think windows believed that the Promise Ultra100 was the same as the Promise Ultra133 and attempted to use the same driver. It worked and I could access my files on the drives connected to the Ultra 100 but once I reboot the computer windows failed to load. Windows fails to load regardless of which controller card is connected, I have to take both out for windows to load up properly. I tried manually uninstalling the drivers by having device manager show drivers for unconnected devices but still no luck. Does anyone have any ideas?

Cliffs
1. 8 IDE devices (motherboard + Controller card)
2. wanted 10 IDE devices adds another controller card
3. Windows implodes and wont boot with either card installed.
 
I recall contacting Promise (or was it Maxtor?) and asking about a similar situation, and they replied that the drivers can only handle a single PCI card at a time. This would be 3 or more years ago, using the original WinXP.

That said, I did not have any problems with a single card instaled, and your issue may be different.

My working solution was to use a RAID card instead of one of the plain UltraXXX card. In the RAID setup I can have a single drive per volume (RAID -1🙂?), and I have 11 IDE spindles running in the machine.

Some Ultra66 cards could be changed with a small hardware mod and a BIOS flash to RAID cards, you may want to investigate that.

Another solution could be to get a card with a different chipset instead of one of the UltraxXXX cards.
 
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