Promise ultra100 TX2 boot problems?

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I recently installed a promise IDE controller to get around some
speed/ size limitations on my system (WindowsME on a pcchips 729mb,
celeron 333). No amount of arm waving and head scratching could get
it to boot with the C drive. The card is working and I can see the C
drive in DOS and move files and directories around but it finds no
boot record and asks for a startup disk.

I tried restoring the master boot record with the card in place
fdisk/mbr, and transferred the system files with no errors. The next
step, according to the promise website is to reformat the drive and
load windows (windows setup/restore fails after the emergency start
disk is made with two lines of hex addresses in the error message).

This seems like a last resort sort of solution. Any way to preserve
the OS and setup and reload Windows?

I was able to connect another drive to the primary IDE connector on
the promise card and formatted it and windows sees it - it is large
enough to hold the entire C drive and then some - is there some way to
transfer the OS to the D drive and then make it boot?

Right now the C drive is boot and on the motherboard IDE, and the
spare D drive is on the promise controller. Ideally I want C,D, and E
on the promise card when I'm finished messing with it.

Drivers are the most recent from the promise site.

Any help would be greatly appreciated . . .

 

[Q]

I recently installed a promise IDE controller to get around some
speed/ size limitations on my system (WindowsME on a pcchips 729mb,
celeron 333). No amount of arm waving and head scratching could get
it to boot with the C drive. The card is working and I can see the C
drive in DOS and move files and directories around but it finds no
boot record and asks for a startup disk.

Have you gone into the motherboard's BIOS and changed the boot sequence of
the drives? I found I needed to do that... on my motherboard, I can select
within the BIOS to first default to a SCSI device (which it treats as being
the promixe Ultra 100 TX2 even though it isn't a SCSI device really, but
E-IDE) and then after doing that, I can then select the priorty for the hard
drives connected to the motherboard's HD controller (i.e. HDD0 HDD1 etc).

I have the same card as you, and have no issues with it. Works fine.

If the above doesn't help, my next guess is that for some reason your
drive's MBR isn't properly set up to be the boot drive. That's a formatting
problem. Some formatting programs that often come bundled with HDs have
features to simplify this task. So you may want to visit your HD
manufacturers' website to see if they have such software.

 

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Have you gone into the motherboard's BIOS and changed the boot sequence of
the drives? I found I needed to do that... on my motherboard, I can select
within the BIOS to first default to a SCSI device (which it treats as being
the promixe Ultra 100 TX2 even though it isn't a SCSI device really, but
E-IDE) and then after doing that, I can then select the priorty for the hard
drives connected to the motherboard's HD controller (i.e. HDD0 HDD1 etc).

I have the same card as you, and have no issues with it. Works fine.

If the above doesn't help, my next guess is that for some reason your
drive's MBR isn't properly set up to be the boot drive. That's a formatting
problem. Some formatting programs that often come bundled with HDs have
features to simplify this task. So you may want to visit your HD
manufacturers' website to see if they have such software.

Thanks for the response.

I did set the boot device to scsi in the bios and restored the mbr -
set it at third boot device since at the time, the only drive on the
system was the promise/c:

I'll go back and see what happens if it is the primary boot device.

Right now, I'm just recovering from a crash. Have to install the card
and driver again, and start over. (promise didn't cause the crash -
but the installation failed the first two attempts and I wanted to
eliminate any variables)

Before I get too gung-ho and crash it again, I figured to load a
CDR with all the drivers and necessary software.