XP misidentifies IDE drives attached to PCI controller card as SCSI

[wiseguy]

Greetings,

I have three IDE hard drives and an IDE CDRW attached to a Maxtor
PCI ATA100 controller in my new system. WinXP misidentifies these
drives as being SCSI drives and gives me some SCSI attributes I can
set in device manager which is a bit silly. I need for xp to properly
identify the drives attached to the controller as ide drives so i can
enable DMA (at least for the CDRW)...

Any help in clearing this problem up would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

John

 

[kursplat]

the maxtor card IS the scsi device. so anything running though it is a scsi device. the attributes that are set should be correct .you don't need to enable DMA.
good luck

 

[Nothinman]

The card isn't a SCSI device, but the driver emulates a SCSI device so that's how it should appear.

 

[wiseguy]

Well, okay, I know that XP says that the card is a SCSI controller, not an IDE controller
and consequently anything attached to it comes up as being SCSI...but why does Win98SE
correctly identify the controller and correctly identify drives attached to it as IDE devices?

Although I can access the drives, there seems to be a lag which I am suspecting is due
to the misidentification of the drives attached to the card. I do not experience this lag
when I boot into Win98SE, everything runs at a steady clip and no lags when I am doing
simple things like moving files between drives or viewing images from the drives attached
to the controller card.

I have a dual-boot, Win98SE-WinXP Pro, arrangement on a P4 1.8A running at 2.4GHz,
so I think my system is robust enough that I should not be getting sluggish behaviour
while doing simple tasks like file moves.

I can't just pull the controller card and solve the problem because I have four drives attached
to the controller and four drives attached to the motherboard's IDE controllers (yes, six hard
drives, a DVDROM, and a CDRW)....

Just wondering why Win98SE handles everything just fine, but XP can't...

 

[Nothinman]

but why does Win98SE
correctly identify the controller and correctly identify drives attached to it as IDE devices?

Because that's how the drivers work, I believe the manufactures need to emulate a SCSI device to be able to use some featuers that the ATA subsystem doesn't support.

Just wondering why Win98SE handles everything just fine, but XP can't...

It's the Maxtor's drivers, not XP. Bitch to Maxtor if you're having problems.

I have personally never had any lag issues when I used IDE devices, except that HPT controllers suck dick. Now I run all SCSI so I can barely remember my IDE days though =)

 

[wiseguy]

Hmmmm... Looks like I need to start pinging Maxtor and see if I can
get an updated driver to solve this problem. I'm pretty sure I got their
latest off their website, but either it's not working 100% or a grabbed
the wrong one...I'll have to check it and see. I seem to recall that their
procedure called for unplugging the drives, updating the drivers, then
plugging the drives back in...I'll have to check that as well...

Thanks for the input Chuck340 and Nothinman...

 

[Superwormy]

That problem probably isn't related to the controller card being detected as SCSI... all NT based OS's (NT Workstation, NT Server, all the Win2ks, and XP) detect that kinda stuff as SCSI... I'd think they woulda fixed a problem like that by now.

Does your system have enough RAM? WinXP is a RAM hog compared to Win98SE...

 

[Nothinman]

all NT based OS's (NT Workstation, NT Server, all the Win2ks, and XP) detect that kinda stuff as SCSI... I'd think they woulda fixed a problem like that by now.

I'm curious why it's a problem...

 

[wiseguy]

I've only got 256MB at the moment but intend to pick up some more
at a computer show tomorrow since I have had no luck buying any
off the FS/FT Forum because I am just not fast enough to catch it
when someone puts some up for sale....

In my situation, the misidentification may or may not be the source
of the sluggishness that I am experiencing when I am moving files
between drives and doing anything with the affected disks. It just
acts as though it's running at lower transfer rates, not as fast as an
ATA4/5 drive should run...something along the lines of running a CDRW
with dma turned off. It might be possible to play around with the SCSI
settings that show up in the drive properties box, but that may make
things worse.

I just need to find the XP drivers for the controller if they exist. And
as I mentioned, I may have to disconnect the drives from the controller,
start up, update the driver for the controller, shut down, connect the
drives to the controller, then boot up and see if they are seen correctly....

 

[mattbta]

<< then boot up and see if they are seen correctly.... >>



It's been explained that all NT based OSes see the drives as SCSI when they are ATA100 drives. I've used NT4, 2k and XP with drives on normal IDE channels and drives on the Highpoint Raid controller. All of them show up as SCSI drives.

Have you searched the MS KB for bulletins on your lag with drives attached to the controller? I know XP has raid issues, but haven't heard of this type of problem. Whatever may be causing your lag, I guarantee that it's not because of the drives showing up as SCSI. You CAN'T get them NOT to show up that way.

 

[Superwormy]

It might just be a bad install of Windows XP... I woudl try to format before anythign else...

Check your BIOS settings too and make sure they are not set as something wierd, and I would check to make sure all of the jumper settings on the backs of the drivers are set appropriately.


It might also be just that Windows XP is a frickin prettied up, glorified POS, Windows NT rippoff...

 

[kursplat]

mmmmm well i have a Promise ATA 100 card in one of mine right now. have accually used a couple of them before, in a few diff comps, and they allways show up as scsi. win 98 or XP .
must be somthin' in the water...

 

[Abzstrak]

its suppose to be scsi, thts not the cause of your problem...

The CDRW really needs to be to use the aspi layer for burning.... IDE just sucks and this is the best way to do it.

if U have a lag, give us more info on that, maybe we can find the real source of the problem.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I read though all of the replies to this thread so far, and I might be able to add some insight.
As far as I know, all of the Maxtor PCI IDE controllers have been relabled Promise Ultra-family cards. I myself own and use a Promise Ultra66 card.
Here's where everything gets really interesting. The Promise Ultra66, Ultra100, and most likely the FastTrack66 and FastTrack100 as well, have reported data-corruption problems under Windows 2000, and some reports under Linux as well. Something about Win9x apparently causes the problem to not manifest itself. (Linux and W2K "push" the hardware much more than Win9x does.)
However, the newest (2.0.29) Promise Ultra family drivers for W2K seem to fix (workaround) this data-corruption issue, by throttling or serializing the transfers between the two IDE channels on the card.
I used to have two drives hooked up, an IBM 30GB 7200 RPM 75GXP as Primary Master (ATA66), and an IBM 13.5GB 7200 RPM 14GXP as Secondary Master (ATA33). With the older drivers (and in Win9x), running Adaptec SCSIBench from EZ-SCSI 5.01 and the latest Adaptec ASPI layer, one could clearly see the performance difference between the two drives. The 14GXP can do 12.9MB/s read, and the 75GXP can do 37MB/s read.
However, with the newest (2.0.29) drivers in W2K, if I have either drive reading by itself (same sector transfers - basically testing the transfer rate of the interface and read cache buffers), then it benchmarks at it's appropriate bandwidth. If I enable *both* drives reading at once, the faster one gets throttled back to the speed of the slower one, cutting my 37MB/s read transfer rate down to 12.9MB/s for my 75GXP.

This is really annoying, but I'm sure that it is necessary to avoid the data-corruption problem that has plagued this controller card.

Perhaps this slowdown is the issue that you are seeing? What version of the drivers are you running?

PS. The identification of the Promise controller card to the OS as a SCSI controller, and subsequently each IDE drive showing up as a "SCSI" device, is normal. The Promise controllers only run with DMA enabled, so you don't have to worry that DMA is disabled. You do need to make sure that you are using an UltraDMA IDE cable though, the one with 80 conductors.

 

[Maki]

The SCSI label of promise like ATA adapters is normal. Don't sweat that.

Here is a question, are you running an AMD Athlon/Duron on a VIA chipset motherboard? Cause, if you are, you might wish to try the VIA PCI latency patch (READ ALL WARNINGS AND BACK UP YOUR DATA BEFORE USING) that can be found over at Viahardware.com. Or if you have a PCI Latency value in your BIOS you might wish to up it to the max value.

[edit] It should be noted that the VIA PCI Latency Patch is not a VIA produced product. It was developed by a third party. FYI

 

[wiseguy]

Where to begin, where to begin...

As for my set-up, I'm running the following:

Asus P4S333
1.8A Northwood @2.4GHz
2x256 Kingston PC2100 DDR
SBLive Value
Intel 10/100+ NIC
ATI AIW Radeon
Maxtor ATA100 Ultra controller
Iomega/Plextor 12x10x32 CDRW
Afreey 10x DVDROM
3x60GB WD HD
1x80GB Compus/Maxtor HD
1x40GB Maxtor HD
1x30GB Maxtor HD

I've not been experiencing the sluggish behaviour lately, but I have not been
messing with the app that I noticed the sluggish behaviour manifesting itself
in either. I added another 256MB of RAM, so I now have a matched set of
Kingston PC2100 sticks with Nanya chips. I may have one or more drives
in the process of crapping out on me, but I am not sure.

Sorry I have not been checking in on this thread a lot, a tree fell on my house
over the weekend (while I was at a computer show), so I have been a bit
preoccupied...