IDE/RAID Controller Problems

Alright, I'll outline my problem (Which sort of ties into my last post) I bought a PCI-expansion-slot product that's labelled as an IDE Controller. It's made by a company called SYBA. I purchased it because my new Mobo has only 2 IDE slots, and both of those are taken up by a Harddrive and a DVD drive. So, I bought this card in the hopes of getting more IDE ports, because I have another DVD ROM and HD that need to be connected.

So, I install the IDE card, plug in both drives on seperate IDE cables (at the end of each cable) and set the jumpers for both the HD and the DVD Rom to master each.

I plug my rig back in, and boot up. After going past my normal boot screen, I get hit with the RAID BIOS for the card. It informs me that it hasn't picked up any IDE devices, skips loading the RAID configuration (since there's nothing to load) and then I continue with my boot.

So I figure it's because I haven't installed any drivers, a CD came with the card, so I pop that in and install the drivers. Now my RAID Controller shows up in the Device manager, but still my drives are absent.

Now, I restart, and the BIOS has picked up my Maxtor HD in one of the slots. Instead of skipping loading the RAID configuration, it sits there, and says that it's loading it. But it doesn't. I'm forced to reboot.

Now here's the kicker. I can't boot to Windows when it detects my one drive (the DVD is absent all the time), so I have to continue rebooting until it DOESN'T pick it up so that I can boot to windows.

When I go into the settings for the cards bios, it allows me to configure the RAID (I set it to IDE rather than any RAID configuration, obviously, since I don't want RAID), but it doesn't do anything, and the next time that I can both get into the settings and have my HD detected it will be reset back to no array.

So, help? I'm considering just returning the card and getting IDE to SATA converters, do they work any better? Or should I stick with this card and try and work it out?

Thanks,

Brad.

 

If a board has two IDE headers it will accomodate 4 IDE devices. If, on the other hand it has only one header and you are referencing "slots" as the intermediate and terminating connectors of a single IDE cable, then you would need an add-on card.

Steve pointed out in a thread a couple of months ago that there are add-on cards which will accomodate either HDD's or optical drives. However, quite a few add-on cards will only accomodate HDD's - they will not work with opticals. What happens when you disconnect the DVD drive currently hooked up to the add-on card?

And yes, a specific model # would be helpful.