ATA100 drive on ATA33 controller

[NiPNi]

I bought an 80GB Western disk yesterday, and was planning to put it into my old computer for use as a file server. The disk is ATA100, and my old computer has an ABit LX6 mobo. The IDE controller on the LX6 is ATA33 (I think, I might be wrong here). The problem is, no matter what I did, the disk would not work on the LX6. When I tried it on my KT7-RAID board, it worked fine. I thought ATA100 disks were compatible with ATA33/66 controllers (I tried both old, standard IDE cables and new ATA66/100 cables, both worked on my KT7 computer, but the ATA66/100 cable won't fit on the LX6. Anyway, as both cable types worked, the cable should not be the problem).

My question is: aren't ATA100 drives compatible with ATA33 controllers? If they're not, then I'll just have to live with that. But I'm fairly certain it should work, and even though I've decided to put the 80GB in my KT7 computer instead, I'd like an explanation as to why it wouldn't work on my old PII.

 

[compudog]

An ATA 100 should work on an ATA 33. The cable should also fit as well. They use the same 40 pin plug on either end. It is the interconnecting cable that is different. There are an additional 40 wires in the ATA66/100 cable to eliminate noise and crosstalk that occurs with the higher data transfer rate. Your LH6 mobo may not be able to access the full capacity of the drive though. Older mobo's have a 32 gig barrier as does Win95. Go HERE for some quick info. Hope this helps.

 

[ukDave]

have you enabled the BIOS to search and find new drives? Is the other IDE interface currently disabled?

 

[GregMal]

I just installed a WD ata100 into my ata33 MB. First you have to
use WD's utility to tell the harddrive to work in ata33.
Then you have to make sure your BIOS can handle over 32 gigs.
If you've downloaded the latest BIOS it should.....
Greg

 

[WhatWasIThinking]

When you say the ATA100 cables won't fit on the LX, is that because of a blocked pin on the connector thingy (I'm a super techie, as you can tell)? If it is, I think you can get ATA100 cables that don't have those. That doesn't address why it doesn't work, but if you get it working you should be able to find an ata100 cable that works with the LX. Also, to ask the obvious question - is the drive jumper set correctly?

 

[Mday]

the motherboard should not be able to recognize the entire capacity of the drive.

get an ata66 or ata100 pci adapter ($40 shipped more or less)...

there was an award bios bug involved with ata66 (which presumably translated to ata100) where the bios would recognize the actual protocol and try to run it as that while the motherboard's controller could not.

 

[NiPNi]

I'll try to answer as many questions as possible here

The BIOS is pretty old, I don't know what version it is, but I haven't upgraded it in at least a couple of years. So I guess the 32GB limit problem is correct. But the drive should still be detected by the BIOS, shouldn't it?

I have autodetect on all IDE devices, but the computer seems to freeze (or keep searching forever) when it comes to the ATA100 drive. I tried switching the master/slave settings and using one drive at a time, and the detection runs just find until it hits the channel with the new drive.

The obvious question: I've tried all sorts of different settings; single master, master with slave, slave, everything (with another drive present at those settings requiring that, of course). Same result every time: whenever the Western drive should be detected during boot-up, nothing happens.

The cable-not-fitting-problem is because of the blocked hole on the connector thingy, yes The cable was actually my first theory, as I've had similar problems before, but this drive worked fine on my other computer with an old cable. I think I'll buy another cable anyway; even though I won't use the drive in the old computer after all, I want to figure this one out I'll also get a new BIOS version and that WD Utility (I didn't get anything with the drive, but I guess it's available on Western's website).

Thanks for the input, people! I'll keep on trying

 

[WhatWasIThinking]

Yeah, a separate adapter might help a lot. I got one (ata33) on ebay for 10 bucks and it seems to be fine (once I got the $%#%^# drivers). If it's an ata100 drive you might as well get an ata100 adapter, which you might be able to find for $30 or so.

 

[DJFuji]

don't worry about dma-33 backwards compatibility and 40/80 pin cables. Your problem, almost guaranteed, is that your mobo cannot see large drives. Trust me, update your BIOS and hope that they've come up with an update that will support large HDDs. My older BH6 system (obviously using the BX chipset) didn't even recognize my 40 gig drive, and the system isn't that old. I had to reflash the BIOS to even get auto detect to see it. Otherwise it looks like there's no device attached.