IDE Controller card problem

[sonyfier]

Here's one that's got me beat and looking for a solution.

Warning long detailed post ahead.

Background info:
I have an Asus A7V333 motherboard with onboard Raid controller (Promise PDC20276) Since I've bought this board I've used the onboard Raid controller to run additional hard drives in single mode use ie not raided. Problem with this controller is that it's slow as a wet week and no solution has ever been posted that gives performance comparable to the normal onboard IDE controller.

Anyway I recently bought one of these ST Labs (Silicon Image chipset) ATA133 cards with the intention of disabling the crappy onboard Raid controller and using the ST Labs controller card to run additional drives and hopefully get some reasonable performance (it couldn't be any worse)

Procedure I followed:
I uninstalled the Promise driver for the onboard Raid, shut down the computer and disabled the controller via motherboard jumper.

I then fitted the ST Labs controller card to PCI slot 2 (without a HDD) I then restarted the machine and bios accepted card and post showed card going through detection routine (no drive fitted so bios wasn't installed etc message) Windows XP detected controller card and asked for driver location, driver installed ok and card shows ok in device manager without any problems.


Fun begins:
Shut down PC and install a HDD to card. Restart PC and card and HDD attached is detected correctly in post and PC continues to boot to windows and just before it gets to the windows XP loading screen the PC freezes, nothing! no matter how long you leave the machine it doesn't progess any further and the HDD activity led is constantly illuminated.

Several reboots and attempts managed to get me into XP on one occasion only to see in device manager an exclamation mark against the controller, bring up properties etc and it is disabled with a Code 10 error. A search of MS knowledge base doesn't bring up much for that error but an explanation of the codes reveals this "This device is either not present, not working properly, or does not have all the drivers installed. (Code 10)

Try upgrading the device drivers for this device."

Well I know the drivers are fine and up to date. The device is definately present as it's detected through post. It's bloody obvious it's not working properly (Thanks MS forever helpful) and all the drivers are installed.
I then decided to install the card into another PCI slot just in case it was a conflict???? I tried both PCI slot 3 and PCU slot 4 and on both occasions I could not get back into windows again as the PC hung like before. It wasn't until I removed the drive from the controller that I managed to get back in and card was fine in device manager (without HDD) and a different IRQ had been assigned. So AFAIK it's not a conflict problem to do with IRQ assignment.

At this stage I was about ready to give up thinking the controller card was faulty so I shut down and re-enabled the onboard Raid controller refitted a HDD to that controller, restarted and once into windows reinstalled drivers for that. It was at this point in time I had realised I hadn't removed the PCI controller card in my haste and utter disgust at the problems I was having so I shut down again with the intention of removing the card and giving up

After 10 minutes or so of cooling off and having a rethink about it I decided to try one more time so rather than go through all the drama of disabling the onboard raid controller and deleting drivers etc I decided just to fit a drive to the PCI controller card while the other controller was in use still.

Big surprise!! the PCI controller with drive attached was now working. A couple of reboots and the controller card with drive attached was still working. Benchmarked a drive on the card and performance was good and it's not only better than the onboard Raid controller but also outperforms the motherboards standard IDE controller. Promise and VIA
Did a couple of big transfers to the drive attached and no problems.

Now that it was working ok I decided to uninstall the onboard Raid driver, shutdown and disable that again! restart the PC and the damn thing freezes again.

Anyway in an effort to try to spare you anymore unnecessasary reading I'll get to the crux of the problem:

The PCI controller card will work fine as long as the onboard Raid is enabled and has a drive also attached to that. If I leave a drive attached to the PCI controller card and leave the onboard Raid enabled but no drive attached it hangs as before. In short the only way I can get the PCI controller card to work is by having a drive attached to both it and the onboard Raid.

I have no idea why the PCI controller card is dependant on the onboard Raid controller??

Obviously I don't want the onboard Raid being used but as it stands I'm forced to use it if I wan't to use the seperate card.

This has got to be an XP bug and I'm reasonably confident that if I was to do a reinstall of XP without my onboard Raid enabled that it would pickup and install drivers correctly for the PCI card and it would work independantly of the onboard Raid but I'm only 3 weeks into a fresh install of XP and I don't want to have to resort to that if possible.

Anyone got any ideas what's going on?

Should also mention that no drives used on either the PCI controller card or onboard Raid controller are on the boot sequence in bios nor do they have an OS on them, ie they're storage drives only.

[alex zorrilla]

My guess is that the Promise controller and the Silicon Image controller use some sort of common or overlapping memory or I/O addresses. Even though you have disabled the Promise controller in the BIOS, it isn't really fully gone, so a command that is intended for the Silicon Image controller gets read by the disabled Promise controller.

An explanation of why they work when they are both enabled could be that they can now properly detect each other and reallocate their resources around each other.

It's a big mess. I would just leave the onboard RAID enabled (with nothing connected to it) and live with it that way.

[sonyfier]

Thanks for the reply Alex

It's a big mess. I would just leave the onboard RAID enabled (with nothing connected to it) and live with it that way.

I would do that except the PCI controller with a HDD attached will still not work unless there is also a drive attached to the onboard Raid controller, ie it's not enough just to have it enabled it has to be used

It's a mess alright. I'm forced to use the slower controller or both.

[sonyfier]

Update:

I got it working finally by itself but the solution is not a very good one.

I disabled the onboard Raid again and uninstalled the drivers and then went into the bios and removed the auto IRQ assignment to PCI slot 2 which the ST Labs controller is in, ie I changed IRQ from (Auto) to (NA). During post no drive is detected and the cards bios is not installed but it boots into windows ok (finally) and drive is seen ok on the controller. In windows it has IRQ 16 assigned to it. (can't change it)

So I can get windows to see and use it but because it's had it's IRQ disabled in bios it's useless as a drive in DOS mode


I've tried all the IRQ assignments in bios (1-15) for PCI slot 2 but all of them including (Auto) cause the PC to freeze before getting into windows as before.

I tried something else to that was equally fruitless:

I attempted to do a Repair of the OS (XP) booting from the CD hoping it would sort out the problems but it also froze during examining hardware (existing setup)

Don't know what to try next?????

[alex zorrilla]

Have you reset the ESCD in the BIOS? Before doing this, reenable everything and set the IRQ back to Auto.