Hello there.

I bought a PCI ATA 100 controller card with the idea that I'd be able to add another 4 devices to my machine. I had a vision of all these extra devices being available and visible in "My Computer" along with the devices plugged into the motherboard's 2 ATA plugs.

When I start up the computer, the controller card registers the additional devices, but that is the last I hear from them; they are not visible anywhere in the GUI.

Was this unrealistic? Can this be done with a controller card, or have I wasted my money?

I am running Windows 2000 Pro on a TUSL2-c, 900mhz celeron computer. Both ATA ports on the MB are fully occupied, by 3 hard drives and 1 CD drive.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Hi Roger
Not an unrealistic idea at all !
What you want is supposed to be what you get!
So, what devices are on the controller card ?

If the added drives on the new controller
are unformatted they will not appear until
they are fdisked. They won't be usable until
formatted. You will have to go to DOS to
fdisk and see if they appear as fdisk option
5 Change current drive. They should appear
as device 4 up, since you already have 3
hard drives.

Drives I was trying to attach were

a CDRW
2 extra hard drives, already formatted
I was also hoping to add a DVD but I have lost faith a bit.

You think it should work?

Should work fine !

1. Have you installed the Windows drivers for the controller card ?

2. In Device Manager, does the controller card show up ?

3. Any errors showing in Device Manager ?

Hello again.

Answering to the above,

1) Yes, I have installed the drivers; no problems there
2) Yes, the card shows up in the device manager
3) No, the device manager does not show any errors for the card, rather it gives the reassuring message "Device working properly".

It is comforting to know that even when nothing is showing up as added to the card, the Device is still "working properly".

Sometimes it all seems to be pot luck.

Umm !!

Okay, in Device Manager, have you checked to see what is showing under the CDROM heading and the Disk Drives heading ( or whatever they are called in Win2k )

I experienced the above problem with a Win2K machine also. I had to contact tech support for the controller, and they told me that in Win2k and WinXP, I had to manually locate the controller and attach drives through ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS in order to manually populate one of the drives, before Win2K would acknowledge its existence. With them on the phone, we had everything going in a couple of minutes. Believe me, if I hadn't called them, I would probably never have gotten it to work - and I have tons of experience. Call 'em up, see what they'll tell you.

Hey Intel, AMD rulez!

make sure your jumpers are set correctly, and that you're using the correct "plug" for the appropriate device, (master plug for master device...), then make sure you're using the correct IDE cable, 40 or 80, last, I make sure the IDE cable is not defective, or the card, try the hardware on your mobo's IDE channels

maybe lack of power to power the drives

Hey, guys! Those EIDE pci controllers require that the drivers be installed in windoze. The controller will show up as a SCSI host adapter, though it is not. You also need at least one hard disk to be connected to it.

DVD is iffy at best on these controllers. Best to have it on mobo eide controller, usually as a master device.

I have a Promise Technology Ultra100 PCI EIDE controller, so I know what I am talking about.

Charles

(Mandrake Linux automatically sees them.)

Thanks everyone for your help.

I have got the thing working now. It turned out that the driver Windows was installing for the device was not the correct one,even off the provided disk, and by trying another one it started up fine. I solved it by selecting "Standard PCI controller" from the hardware list and a standerd driver from the driver list. I am sure this will not give it optimum performance, but it is better than the "Device working properly" I was getting before.

Thanks again.