Installing and Configuring    Hard Disk Drives, Raid Controller Cards

This page applies to two situations.   Using new larger and faster ATA 100 hard disk drives to upgrade our old ATA 33 motherboards  or working with modern motherboards, which have a separate raid IDE controller chip onboard.

  If you  need to get a 100 % increase in speed by stripping two new ATA 100 drives together or mirroring two drives together for automatic backup you need raid and my favorite choice, in an old motherboard to run new ATA100 hard disk drives, is the Promise FastTrak 100  Raid IDE controller card.  This off board IDE controller cards costs about $80 at street level prices and plugs into a PCI slot on your motherboard.  If not mirroring or striping get the Promise Ultra 100 plain Version for about $40.  Or if you just bought any new motherboard with raid onboard the following also applies. 

Whether this IDE chip is onboard or off board we first make sure we have the latest   BIOS   then, normally start with the hard drives connected to the non raid or older slower PCI to IDE controller chip on our motherboard. The idea is to get the new drivers in for the new PCI to IDE chip and then transfer the IDE cables to the new chip to boot your drives.

 If your  IRQ's are all tied up with lots of on or off board devices, we must temporary borrow a free IRQ temporarily  by shutting  off and or removing some PCI cards temporarily to allow a PNP operating system ( windows 2000 or ME ) to detect the card, request drivers, install drivers,  and restart the computer, at which time we will also shut down the computer and transfer our IDE drive cables to the new chipset controller.     In NT4 ( a non PNP Operating System ) , go to control panel, SCSI and add the new driver and re-start.

 In any computer the Video Card must be in the highest socket it will fit. All computer BIOS systems count from the top socket down, and video should be the first counted. If your video card is AGP, you must skip using the next socket down ( a PCI socket ) for any purpose, as it shares the same IRQ with any AGP video card above it.  As we want this Hard disk drive controller card to have the second priority in BIOS, it  will be located in the highest usable PCI slot.  If your chip is onboard this doesn't apply.

Before continuing along make sure you have the latest motherboard BIOS version installed  <<<here>>>.    Then go into BIOS and document all of your settings.  Now with AC power plug removed from the rear,  install the new card in the highest usable PCI slot  ( see paragraph above )  .   If you do have an AGP video card, install the controller card in the second PCI slot down, as the first PCI slot will be sharing a IRQ with the AGP video card. Leave the hard drives on their normal motherboard sockets at this time. Next while power is still unplugged reset the CMOS jumper on motherboard for 30 seconds, then normal the jumper up, apply power and boot into BIOS setup. Old motherboards usually have two defaults which cause problems with this new card especially in new operating systems. In most cases you are better off with APM ( advanced power management ) = Off and  IDE bus mastering = ON.   Find these and "do it to them".  Also, set PNP Operating System to = ON.  If you have a free IRQ for the card, when you boot into your operating systems a PNP  window will appear and say a new device has been found and ask you for the driver. Install the driver saying " have disk" and continue along and when prompted "re-start". If you have other operating systems, repeat the above in each.  Now go into BIOS and find and turn off your Primary IDE onboard  port. This will allow IRQ 15 to be available for the new controller card with up to four hard drives connected to it.  Leave your secondary on as this will still be used by your Atapi IDE Burner and CD ROM on your onboard Secondary Channel, which uses IRQ14. With PNP still on and resetting configuration (ESCD) =ON . Leave BIOS saving settings. Now with Computer AC power removed, using the new 80 pin cables, connect  all your hard disk drives to the new card IDE connectors and boot the computer.

I have only seen one case so far in a 1997, Dell XPS  where the old motherboard wouldn't run the new ATA 100 drive properly at ATA33, making the controller more than necessary, not just for a speed increase.

Important ! ! The only time you ever need PNP ON is when adding or changing position of Cards.

 09/18/2004 07:52 -0500