PCI controller card

i have bought a new 80gb maxtor diamond plus 9 ata/133 harddrive and can't get it working,i am using winxp pro w/ecs k7s5a.
it looks like to me the new hdd is too fast for the MOBO.
would a ata pci card 133 help?

 

Hi,

Is the drive recognised in the BIOS? You can go into the BIOS settings and check there. If your BIOS has it, you can try "Autodetect drive ". I would expect that an ATA 133 drive should originally be set at ATA 100 to be "seen" by the majority of BIOSes. There will be a utility to download at Matrox to change the ATA (ATA 133 is "UDMA 6 "; ATA 100 is "UDMA 5 ").

Your motherboard is only UDMA 5 (ATA 100) capable, so if you wanted to utilise the ATA 133 setting, yes, you would need a PCI IDE card...but...you would probably not notice the difference if you only ran the drive at ATA 100.

Your drive may be "factory formatted" or completely blank. You would need the Maxtor utilities to partition and format it. The utilities are PowerMax and MaxBlast. Avoid installing the Dynamic Drive Overlay (Disk Manager) in MaxBlast, it may cause problems later.

Let me know if any of this is "fuzzy ".

Matt

 

I used to run that board in my kid's rig and half the time it wouldn't recognize the drive that was a permanent part of that rig if I messed with it at all! If I disconnected the drive or connected another drive, I couldn't get the board to recognize the original drive.

There was only 1 thing for me to do and it always worked eventually - and that was to clear the CMOS. As far as I remember, that always did the trick.
I attribute it to another flakey problem of the K7S5A, of which there have been many.

Gary