P4c800-e Promise Controller/Ide Drives

[Jeff]

Hi,

I know somewhere this may have been asked and answered already but here it
is again.

On a P4c800-e MB with the promise controller, can the SATA ports and IDE
ports be used in a NON raid configuration.

I'd like to add a IDE hard drive or CD rom to the IDE port and a sata HD to
the SATA port on the promise controller.

Also, if possiblem can an ide hard drive be the only device on the port or
does thee have to be 2 drives, one of them being sata?

Is it possible or is the Promise controller for Raid only.

On the CD rom there are fastract drivers and promise sata controllers.

In the bios i enabled IDE not raid...still in control panel under scsi is
FASTRACK.

Also, if all this is possible, can you boot off the Hard drive connected to
the Promise port?

TIA

Jeff

 

[Paul]

Hi,

I know somewhere this may have been asked and answered already but here it
is again.

On a P4c800-e MB with the promise controller, can the SATA ports and IDE
ports be used in a NON raid configuration.

I'd like to add a IDE hard drive or CD rom to the IDE port and a sata HD to
the SATA port on the promise controller.

Also, if possiblem can an ide hard drive be the only device on the port or
does thee have to be 2 drives, one of them being sata?

Is it possible or is the Promise controller for Raid only.

On the CD rom there are fastract drivers and promise sata controllers.

In the bios i enabled IDE not raid...still in control panel under scsi is
FASTRACK.

Also, if all this is possible, can you boot off the Hard drive connected to
the Promise port?

TIA

Jeff

The manual says the Promise controller does not take ATAPI devices.
That means no CD/CDRW/DVD etc type devices on it.

There is a vanilla ATA driver for the Promise, and you can then
stick hard disk devices on the PATA or SATA interfaces. I've had
one drive on the Promise PATA cable by itself, and that worked.
(Mind you, I didn't boot off it, so I cannot personally attest
to its bootability.)

The only thing I get nervous about, is moving already formatted
drives, between the Promise interfaces and the Southbridge
interfaces. I think everything will be fine, if you fresh format
a drive on the new interface you connect it to. I'm not quite
as comfortable taking already formatted devices and sticking
them on the Promise, or vice versa (taking drive prepped on
Promise and putting it on a non-Promise controller). Moving
a Promise prepped drive to another Promise controller is supposed
to work (according to the people at Promise).

My suspicion is the Promise controller still has elements of
"RAIDness" in it, even when the ATA driver is used. I lost a
partition, by prepping a drive on an ordinary IDE interface,
and then messing with it on the Promise controller. Since I
have no tools for debugging disk problems, I cannot tell you
what happened, and at the time, I didn't have a lot of time
to figure it out. That is the experience that makes me nervous
about moving the drives around. As long as the drive stays on
there, it should be fine.

As long as there is a driver installed via F6 during the Windows
install, I don't see a reason why a non-RAID hard drive on the
Promise wouldn't boot. To boot, two things are needed. There
has to be support for booting from a device in the BIOS (via
INT13H call), and there has to be a driver in Windows that knows
about a custom PCI bus controller, and that is where the F6
install of the ATA driver will come in handy. You would do
the install that way, _after_ setting the BIOS so the Promise
is in non-RAID mode. I don't know what will happen if the Promise
is still in RAID mode and you tried installing the ATA driver.
Chances are, Windows would barf at some point.

HTH,
Paul