Any success with Promise Ultra 133 TX2 card on Asus P4P800 Deluxe Board?

[bawaji]

Has anyone been successful in running a Promise Ultra 133 TX2 card (I have one bundled with a 160GB Maxtor Hard Drive) on the ASUS P4P800 Motherboard?

I am able to install the card and get it to be recognized by Windows XP as long as there is no drive connected to it. As soon as I connect a Hard Drive to it, Windows XP does not start up. I just get a blank dark screen like it is waiting for something. The card recognizes the drive during the bootup process before Windows starts. The boot sequence is correct with the boot drive on the primary onboard IDE controller listed before the Ultra card.

Any idea what I should be doing to get Windows XP to see the card? Should I change anything in the BIOS. Everything in the BIOS is at the default value - Onboard IDE Operate Mode on [Enhanced Mode], Enhanced Mode Support On on [SATA], IDE Detect Time Out at [35], and 32 Bit Data Transfer [Disabled].

Thanks!

 

[jaeger66]

Are you trying to boot from the card?

 

[sep]

I never was able to get my Maxtor ATA133 (promise TX2) PCI card to work in my system (gigabyte 8IXHP).

 

[bawaji]

No, I am not booting from the card. I have a hard drive on the primary onboard ATA connector which I boot from. I plan to have four ATAPI devices and at least three hard drives in the PC. Hence, I was planning to put the 4 ATAPI devices on the onboard primary and secondary ports, two hard drives (one each) on the primary and secondary connector for the onboard VIA connectors, and one or two hard drives on the ATA133 card. Hope it is possible!

 

[hernia1]

I was considering trying this card and saw in another thread that someone was using one, his problem was memory but he might have some answers for you. Just search for the P4P800 forum postings only. I think it's the same guy with posting title "this board is driving me crazy!" or something.

Anyway...Something to try...make sure that your IDE Boot Drive doesn't have the jumper set to Master. I made this mistake with my Western Digital. ASUS and the Drive Label states that if it's the only drive on the cable, the jumper "box" must be removed to set the drive to "single". Otherwise, the system can hang on bootup.

 

[hernia1]

Also, you need to look in the Promise card BIOS, not the Motherboard BIOS to set the boot drive....if you plan to eventually boot from a drive on the card.

 

[bawaji]

I finally got the card working but I don't know exactly how! I set the Enhanced Mode Support to PATA&SATA and the card worked. However, the HD I had connected to a primary IDE port at that time was coming up only in DMA 2 mode and not DMA 5 mode. I set the Enhance Mode Support back to SATA and the card continued working! I had also updated the BIOS on the card to the latest from the Promise website and also the WinXP drivers. So, I am not sure which of these actually helped! It looked like just going into the motherboard bios and saving the current settings might have worked, for some reason.

The only problem I noticed now was that if I connect a CDRW drive to the Promise controller, it works fine in WinXP. However, Nero Infotools causes the PC to reboot. Hope it is just a problem with Nero tools.

I ended up ordering a HighPoint RocketHead 100 SATA-to-PATA adapter, thinking I may not be able to get the card to work. Does anyone know if it will run my hard drive faster than the onboard VIA controller? It had already shipped before I got the card working.

How do you look into the Promise BIOS to set the boot drive? I don't know how to get into its Boot BIOS.

Thanks everyone for your responses.

Sep: If you need to know about any of the settings on my motherboard (though it is different from yours) let me know, in case you are interested in giving another shot at your card. I would suggest updating the BIOS and Drivers and trying again. Good Luck!

 

[sep]

Too late. I sold the card. However, I could buy one from a friend who has 3!

Thanks,
-JC

 

[bawaji]

I received the RocketHead 100 SATA-PATA adapter and connected my boot drive to the SATA connector using it. However, the drive benchmark scores using PCMark 2002 seem to be lower with the SATA connector than when the drive was connected to one of the VIA controller ports.

Is this normal? I thought the SATA ports have a higher throughput than the PATA ports! Is there anything I can do to speed up the drive? It is a Maxtor ATA 133 drive with 8MB cache.