Additional ATA Controller

[Charles Shapiro]

I purchased a 200 GIG WD drive that came with a ATA100TX Promise controller.

I am trying to get to see my CD-ROMS so that I can hook the harddrive up to
the
systems motherboard instead of this additional controller. The problem is I
can't
get the controller to see the CD's. It sees the harddrive OK and I was
finally able
to install Promise's drivers (instead of XP's drivers), but not before
loosing 40GIG's
worth of data.

I had it in a shared slot, but have moved it and gotten a shorter IDE
cable.

When the controllers' bios shows up, it shows that is has detected the CD's,
but then
the next line it outputs to the screen says " The BIOS wasn't loaded as
there are no
drives connected".

Any ideas?

Thanks.

...Chip..

[David Vair]

The BIOS from the card will not load when connected to just CD's, the BIOS on the card is to make it
so hard drives that are bootable can be booted from. As long as the CD's are detected the
information should be passed to Windows and they should be usable within Windows.
--
Dave Vair
CNE, CNA, MCP, A+, N+
Computer Education Services Corp. (CESC)

"Charles Shapiro" > wrote in message news:USBoa.3994$kj.506@fed1read05...
> I purchased a 200 GIG WD drive that came with a ATA100TX Promise controller.
>
> I am trying to get to see my CD-ROMS so that I can hook the harddrive up to
> the
> systems motherboard instead of this additional controller. The problem is I
> can't
> get the controller to see the CD's. It sees the harddrive OK and I was
> finally able
> to install Promise's drivers (instead of XP's drivers), but not before
> loosing 40GIG's
> worth of data.
>
> I had it in a shared slot, but have moved it and gotten a shorter IDE
> cable.
>
> When the controllers' bios shows up, it shows that is has detected the CD's,
> but then
> the next line it outputs to the screen says " The BIOS wasn't loaded as
> there are no
> drives connected".
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks.
>
> ..Chip..
>
>

[Fleabus]

On Sun, 20 Apr 2003 18:26:22 -0400, "David Vair"
> wrote:

>> I purchased a 200 GIG WD drive that came with a ATA100TX Promise controller.
>>
>> I am trying to get to see my CD-ROMS so that I can hook the harddrive up to
>> the
>> systems motherboard instead of this additional controller. The problem is I
>> can't
>> get the controller to see the CD's. It sees the harddrive OK and I was
>> finally able
>> to install Promise's drivers (instead of XP's drivers), but not before
>> loosing 40GIG's
>> worth of data.
>>
>> I had it in a shared slot, but have moved it and gotten a shorter IDE
>> cable.
>>
>> When the controllers' bios shows up, it shows that is has detected the CD's,
>> but then
>> the next line it outputs to the screen says " The BIOS wasn't loaded as
>> there are no
>> drives connected".
>>
>> Any ideas?
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> ..Chip..
>>

Chip:

A Promise manual will tell you to use their controller card only
with HDDs. You are expected to attach just HDDs to it and attach your
optical etc drives to your motherboard IDE connectors. If your boot
drive is on the card, the Boot Sequence in your system bios should
have SCSI device as the first bootable device it will see.
If you want to boot from a HDD on the mainboard's IDE, change the
sequence so that it will precede SCSI device in the boot sequence
order.
In my case I use a Promise controller and one of the HDDs on it is
my boot drive. Since I sometimes use my floppy or disc drive to boot,
I have the system poll through my drives until it finds a bootable
one.

My boot sequence:
1 Removeable Device [Legacy Floppy}
2 ATAPI CD-ROM [Toshiba DVD-ROM]
3 Other Boot Device {SCSI Boot Device]
4 IDE Hard Drive [None]

AFAIK, if you use WinXP SP1. NTFS and partition the 200GB drive so
that no partition exceeds 137MB, you may not require a controller card
for your system to fully see/use all of the 200GBs. Others will chime
in here if I'm not fully correct.

Hope something in the above helps,

[Charles Shapiro]

> A Promise manual will tell you to use their controller card only
> with HDDs. You are expected to attach just HDDs to it and attach your
> optical etc drives to your motherboard IDE connectors. If your boot
> drive is on the card, the Boot Sequence in your system bios should
> have SCSI device as the first bootable device it will see.
> If you want to boot from a HDD on the mainboard's IDE, change the
> sequence so that it will precede SCSI device in the boot sequence
> order.
> In my case I use a Promise controller and one of the HDDs on it is
> my boot drive. Since I sometimes use my floppy or disc drive to boot,
> I have the system poll through my drives until it finds a bootable
> one.
>
> My boot sequence:
> 1 Removeable Device [Legacy Floppy}
> 2 ATAPI CD-ROM [Toshiba DVD-ROM]
> 3 Other Boot Device {SCSI Boot Device]
> 4 IDE Hard Drive [None]
>
> AFAIK, if you use WinXP SP1. NTFS and partition the 200GB drive so
> that no partition exceeds 137MB, you may not require a controller card
> for your system to fully see/use all of the 200GBs. Others will chime
> in here if I'm not fully correct.
>
> Hope something in the above helps,


Thanks. Turns out that the reason the bios isn't loading is because it will
only
load when hdd's are hooked up to it. I have that 200gig drive as the
secondary master
device while both CD's are hooked up to the Promise controller and all is
working
perfectly.

...Chip..