New UDMA 133 controller won't boot CDs or allow startup disks to access CD! HELP!

I recently got an ultra dma 133 adaptor card (Promise Ultra133)for my desktop and a new 80gig drive.

I hooked everything up as you would expect and got ready to put my win2000 cd in the drive to install the os. However, I CANNOT access the CD from any startup disks nor can I boot from the bootable CD!!!

My MB has a now-obsolete HDD controller onboard. I disabled it in the BIOS and used the new card. Now, the "configure hard drive" screen all appear as "not installed" in the BIOS.

Floppies that normally load CD drivers don't recognize the CD. Apparently the CD is not recognized as a boot device.

When I used the old HDD, which is failing, I could access the drives without much trouble.

What the hades is wrong? Should I not see the drives listed in the BIOS screens, even with an offboard controller?

Please help - i'm stuck and can do nothing more.

 

Hello Stelliger, welcome to the BBS

If you could provide a little more info, it might help us along the way.

What model Promise ATA133 card did you install ??

What motherboard and model number do you have ??

What 80 GB HDD did you choose ??

I'll stop here so others can collect their thoughts about your problems and perhaps post with help.

Daddad

 

Most add-on cards will NOT recognize optical drives.
Mount the hard drive on the card, mount the optical on primary master, ensure that multiple devices are enabled in BIOS, usually in the order you want to boot from.
BIOS would then be set up (probably) like this:
First boot device: Floppy
Second bood device: CDROM
Third boot device: SCSI
The SCSI is actually the promise card, and the BIOS should see it as such.
Make sure you remove all hard drives from BIOS (the first screen should all say NONE, unless your BIOS recognizes optical drives).

 

Thank you all for the repsonses. Let me address the comments and add info:

daddad,
It's Promise Ultra 133 (actually the Maxtor label but it's the same card & chipset)

It's a Supermicro P6DNF motherboard with Am Megatrends BIOS

It's a WD 80gig drive, I'd have to check the model, but that doesn't seem to be the problem at all; the drives are recognized by the Promise BIOS


PeteC,
The old controller only recognizes 64gig on the drive. However that's only part of the issue; it's a slow controller and I'd really like to use a UDMA unless there's some fundemental incompatibility with all UDMA controllers.

As for the Promise website, I've looked there and at al the FAQs. No help.

Yes, BIOS is the latest.

Biggest thing I'm trying to do is determine if something is incompatible or otherwise going wrong. There are a couple workarounds to preserve the data but I'd like to know how I'm supposed to work with this board.


reboot,
I don't have an optical drive. I have 2 HDDs and one CDROM. I want to connect all three to the Promise card. Ideally I'd like to boot from the Promise card connected CDROM. However, if the Promise reports like a SCSI device, how do I boot from the CDROM on the Promise and NOT from the IDE drives?

There also is the problem that using startup disks, I can't get the CDROM drive to be recognized as a valid drive so i can install the OS.

 

Ahh, yes

I was thinking of the r/w drives of old which were actually named "optical discs ".

As for the recognition - the add-on (UDMA) card recognized the presence of the CDROM. Additionally, the UDMA card even recognizes when I have a bootable CD in it (it gives me a note that a bootable CD is in the drive). What does NOT happen is that I cannot boot from this bootable CD. It's recognized, but I cannot boot. I also cannot get ASPI drivers on floppy to recognize the CD.

My concerns with putting the CD on the onboard controller are threefold:

1. The CD drive will now have a drive letter LOWER than the hard drives since the onboard driver fires up first (e.g. the CD will become drive C

2. This will occupy another IRQ on a system already overburdened with IRQ requests

3. I believe the onboard controller may be failing


Interestingly, the literature with the controller says nothing about the inability to recognize and boot from CDROM drives connected to the controller. Indeed, the literture implies my system BIOS will recognize drives connected to the add-on card!

 

Thanks.

The maxtor link you provided was of no help, however. It didn't tell me much that I didn't already know.

It also didn't address the "cannot boot to bootable CDROM" issue.

 

Any Intel chipset for a 100MHz FSB CPU or higher supports ATA 33 / UDMA for CDroms.

The Promise cards are NOT recommended for use with a CDrom even when they can work with a CDrom.

I use to work for a major Computer mfg and they never allowed anyone to connect a CD/DVD to a Promise card - there is no speed increase even if the card would work with a CDrom.

Run your CD/DVD off the controller on the MBD - either channel.

 

Profgab,

Thanks for that info. Always good to know when there are problems and things should be avoided.

That just leaves me with two questions -

1. What does that do to my letter assignments? I don't want my CDROM drive to be C:

2. Are there ANY cards, non-Promise based, that would be recommended to attach CDROM drives to? I can always take this controller back. I'm concerned that my MB controller may be failing (but since it's only a CDROM drive it may not be critical until and IF it does since the machine would continue to run without the CDROM drive).

Oh, and for the record - this is a Pentium Pro (dual) MB that I've put two overdrive chips on. It actually outperforms my buddy's 1.2GHz single CPU machine on most tasks (at least the system never has to wait like his does). Right now I'm using my laptop which is actually the more modern machine.

 

It does nothing to the Drive Letter assignments, personally I have an old ASUS board with two onboard controllers with two connectors each, one is a standard IDE where I have my DVD-ROM and CD-RW, and the other is a Promise ATA-100 controller, and in the mobo manual it specifies that the Promise controller should only be used with HDDs.

And the drive letters show up as standard on a fresh install, ie. system drive C: and any other HDD partitions following and optical drives last.

And friends and colleagues have separate controller cards in combination with the default controller, also without adverse affect on the drive lettering.

Besides Win2K has the option to switch drive letters if you should feel the need for that (the system drive cannot be switched though).

 

The system/boot drive will always be C, unless something else changed that during a reinstall, or you manually assigned a different letter.
Mount each hard drive on it's own channel (cable) on the controller card.
Mount the CD-ROM anywhere on the motherboard's IDE.
Set BIOS boot order to
Floppy, CD-ROM, SCSI.
Make sure you set "Boot other devices" to YES.
Now attempt to boot to the floppy.
If all is well, try a boot to the CD-ROM.
If all is well, then you can proceed to install the OS.
Unless there is a hardware fault, this will work.
If you get ANY error messages, or hangs, please detail those results here. It's possible a cable is bad, or a drive is jumpered wrong, or the card has a bad slot...

 

Hmmm

OK - Pentium Pro - a dual Socket 8 board? Might have an Early GX Chipset?

Sounds like an old server board. Some of those PentPro chips had boco cache like Xeon processors today.

Trivia Time: The Pentium II processor was based on the Pentium Pro core with 512K cache. IIRC the Pentium Pros were available with up to 2MB cache!

I have a standard ESDI/IDE ISA card that could be used with an IDE CDrom - but I don't think the BIOS would attempt to boot from it.

Anyway - best of luck with it.

 

Laage;

Only concern has been that the CDROM drive would take over drive C: when I installed and thus the system/boot drive would NOT be able to be C: as I want it.

Anyway, I'm on hold with that for now. I got the old system drive to work on the onboard controller and the new drive on the promise controller to transfer data. Now, however, I'm having trouble reloading Win2k since I had a disk error in the middle of all this and now the win2k setup hangs at 'starting windows 2000'....

Sigh.


Reboot;
Yes, I had that boot order except that my BIOS doesn't allow a choice of booting to SCSI as the third option. It's only available in the first list. CDROM is only available on first and third choices.

prof;
Yes, dual socket 8 P Pro with PII overdrives. Don't know about GX chipset. Seems the board draws a LOT of power since my power connectors were somewhat burned; second time this has happened. I replaced them today and will see if I have better hardware luck. Still can't get win2k install to work, though, so that I might repair the failed win2k install on the old drive before setting up the new drive...

 

OK... now I'm worried. I was feeling better for a while but now I'm worried.

I got the old suspect HDD to boot up off the onboard controller while I had the good HDD and the brand new 80gb drive on the promise controller. All seemed to be fine as I backed up the data from the suspect (old) drive to the new drive. Some data I had put on the 40gb drive (existing but good- it's the 6gb drive which was failing).

Well, now it gets interesting. Once while I was copying some files around getting the 80gb drive ready to be my new system drive, the 80gb drive quit responding. The 6gb (the suspect one) and the 40gb drives were working fine, oddly enough.

NOW, however, I cannot get the 80gb drive to register on the promise card OR the onboard controller. It registers as a drive on the onboard but won't mount. It won't register as installed AT ALL on the promise card. It was seen for a while but wouldn't boot... now nothing.

The drive spins up and sounds normal when powered up. I see no reason for it to fail. It's only 5 days old!!!!

I need to get ideas for how to revive this brand new drive enough to get the data off. I am utterly sickened by this, since I moved a lot of data off of a good 40gb drive to this brand new drive only to have IT now fail. I don't know if something else is wrong or if I'm just doomed to lose data. But who would have thought a brand new drive would fail before I could even back up the data?!?!?!?!

I may post this info in a new thread to get some new opinions.