ultra100 bios not installed because no drives attached

[dcdomain]

Everything was working fine until I decided to format my OS partition.

Because of my paranoia, I disconnect all the drives connected to the PCI IDE card and left just the master harddrive and the cd burner connected to the IDE slots on the motherboard.

Now when I boot up, the damn card won't find all the drives! Sometimes it'll find one, or two... but it will never find all four drives. In addition the system just reboots from time to time now. I'm going through another format with all the drives installed and connected, hope it'll work out. But as of now, when I went to install the OS, it still couldn't detect any drives...

I also took the PCI card out, disconnected all IDE cables and power cables and reconnected them all. Still no luck.

 

[Viper96720]

Drivers for it installed. When I used the Ultra 133 card I had to install drivers for it to work.

 

[dcdomain]

Yeah I'm looking for the drivers now. The thing that I didn't get was this... even though I have no drivers installed, shouldn't the system still recognize the harddrives since that message pops up after the initial load up and before the WinXP start up screen appears?

Update: No luck, turns out WinXP already had the drivers installed. I downloaded the newest ones, but apparently the WinXP versions are better or newer than the ones I downloaded. Anyway, I disregarded it and went ahead and installed the drivers I downloaded from Promise's site.

Also tried moving the PCI cards around, still no luck. The hell is going on!?!?!?!?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Try removing and re-attaching the drive cable(s) at both ends (card & drive).

 

[dcdomain]

Yeah I did that, I disconnected all cables (IDE & power) as well as the PCI card, moved it to another slot even. The system recognizes the card just fine, but won't recognize any drives on the card.

I just got a newer card from a bro (ultra100tx2 instead of just an ultra100) so I'm hoping that'll change thigns around for me.

 

[dcdomain]

Sweetness, at first only two drives worked on IDE1 of the PCI card.
So I swapped in a new cable for IDE2 on the PCI card and now all the drives are working!
I guess when I disconnected the drives it somehow messed up the cables...

The only other problem I'm running into now is that the computer sometimes restarts on its own. I wonder if a bad cable would cause that. I might replace the other IDE cable as well.