HD disappeared in W2000 with A7V333

[Jeff Lake]

Hi there.

I've got an ASUS A7V333 motherboard with the following IDE setup:
IDE1: two HDs
IDE2: two CD-ROM drives
IDE3: one HD
IDE4: one HD
No RAID, just stand-alone disks. This setup has been working just fine
until recently. After a problem (explorer.exe refused to run) I ended up
reinstalling Windows 2000. At some point of the process (maybe after
installing SP4 or removing the video drivers) I noticed that W2000 has
stopped recognizing the HD in IDE3.

Now then, I've been un- and reinstalling Fasttrak and VIA drivers, I've
reinstalled W2000 several times, both on top of the previous one as well as
cleanly on a different partition and can't seem to get the disk to work.
When reinstalling I've tried to give the Fasttrak driver on a disk in the
beginning of the setup (using F6) as well as skipping it. There are no error
messages, it just goes undetected - no sign of it at the Disk Management.

Now I know what you think - the disk must be broken. But no. In Linux it
still works as fine as it always did. Furthermore, if I move it to IDE2
(away from the Promise controller), W2000 successfully recognizes and
handles it. Moving it to IDE4 doesn't help, though, even though the disk
currently in IDE4 works fine.

Between the working state and the problematic state I made no hardware
changes and my BIOS (v1014) configuration is still the same. The problematic
disk contains a single 80GB NTFS partition. I'm running out of ideas what
to try next. Can anyone help?

Jeff

 

[Edwin Davidson]

Does it show up at all? Under device manager? Have you tried setting
it to Disabled, then rebooting, then setting it to Enabled? That
worked once for me w/a simular problem. What do you have on that
drive? I had problems with W2000 knocking the heck out of a EXT3
partition (but didn't realize it until I took the case off and heard
it.) I guess W2000 doesn't like EXT3.

 

[Jeff Lake]

Does it show up at all? Under device manager? Have you tried setting
it to Disabled, then rebooting, then setting it to Enabled? That
worked once for me w/a simular problem.

Under device manager/Disk drives I have one Promise 1+0 Stripe/RAID0 SCSI Disk
Device which I believe corresponds to the disk that's working. Disabling,
rebooting and then reenabling Win2000 Promise MBFastTrak133 Lite (tm)
Controller under SCSI and RAID controllers makes no change. Promise BIOS does
recognize the drive as before.

What do you have on that
drive? I had problems with W2000 knocking the heck out of a EXT3
partition (but didn't realize it until I took the case off and heard
it.) I guess W2000 doesn't like EXT3.

There's a single NTFS partition which works fine if I move it to IDE2 (i.e.
away from the Promise controller).
A possibly interesting new observation: if I swap the problematic disk with the
CD-ROM drives, all the HDs work but CD-ROM drives don't (in Win2000 that is).
In this scenario I can boot from a CD but when Windows setup tries to start
Windows, it stops with INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.

Jeff

 

[Edwin Davidson]

If I understand correctly, it sounds like one of your IDE controller
channels went bad. We have hundreds of PC's where I work, and that
has happened on a few of them. IDE0 works, IDE1 doesn't - or visa
versa. Mobo problems in our case -- all we use is ASUS Mobo's w/built
in IDE channels. We just drop a
Promise card in if we need the additional channel. Make sure you have
the very latest drivers for your IDE card as there have been some
major problems solved by the latest drivers in the last 6 months..
Spent a year on video/audio skipping problems due to bad promise
drivers...