Maxtor ATA100 Adaptor problems

[pmistry 0]

I decided to get a Maxtor ATA 100 adapter and hook up my ATA 100 hard disks with it. Right now my motherboard only supports ATA 66. I booted up WinXP with my card installed and installed the drivers for it. I shut down and hooked up my hard disks to it, a WD (Maxtor) 80GB ATA100 and a Maxtor (Slave) ATA-100 20GB. I also configured my PC to boot from SCSI. The ATA card detects the hard disks without a problem but the system won't boot. I then tried to boot from a floppy disk and again the computer won't boot past the bios screen. I removed the ATA card and plugged the drives back into the motherboard and everything works fine. So I then hooked my secondary hard disk into the Adapter in IDE2 and left my primary WD drive in the motherboard and the PC took a really long time to boot up. There must be some sort of conflict between the 2 IDE bus masters, anyone have a solution to this?

 

oh btw, I have a VIA Chipset and I am pretty this is a VIA problem.

[pmistry 0]

Update: I disabled the onboard VIA IDE controller and hooked up all my devices to the ATA100 card and the system booted up properly and quickly. When I reenabled the onboard VIA everything slowed down again, VIA just pisses me off. I think I will just return this card and forget this whole damn idea. I really needed the extra IDE ports to hook up the hard disks as I would actually be using my ATA-100 features and it would have allowed me to get a DVD-Rom drive for the motherboard controllers, but forget that now.

[Brian Frank 0]

You could try a HighPoint controller card too.

[pmistry 0]

Yeah it would be nice to try a HighPoint card, my old VIA board an Abit KA7-100 had one with it and it worked fine with the onboard VIA controllers, its just that I can't find a Canadian retailer for HighPoint cards, but my thinking now is to just wait until I get a new motherboard (non-VIA) and have it come with RAID support so I get extra plugs that way.

[Brian Frank 0]

Abit, Epox, Iwill, and Soyo are in the HighPoint camp. If there is anything I dislike about Asus, it's the use of the Promise controllers, as I just want the extra IDE controllers.

You're probably wise to hold off for a new board, as the newest HighPoint cards get pretty pricey, and they cost more than many motherboards 8) .

 

Maxtor was using Promise chips (the card is just a relabled Promise Ultra ATA100 card) last I checked. Not sure if this means anything.

 

Oh, and if you want my opinion on what chipsets to look at in a motherboard here they are: nForce/nForce 2 for AMD, Intel 845E/G for P4 stuff.

[pmistry 0]

Definitely going with some sort of motherboard with Highpoint controller. The one on my KA7-100 was very useful. The Maxtor ATA-100 that I returned was a repackaged Promise card, pathetic piece of crap.

[Alien 1]

If you want tonnes of IDE connectability, & don't need legacy compliance then Abit may have what you need, depending on which flavour of CPU you prefer, AMD or Intel, there's 2 boards - the AT7 & the IT7. Both can run upto 12 IDE devices, & seeing as they use a highpoint RAID controller [from what I've heard] you should be just fine running drives normally [instead of in a RAID array].