Frustrated IBM 75GXP owner

[Guest]

G'day,
I bought an IBM 75GXP 30g hard drive a few days ago and have been struggling with it for the past few days now. I can't seem to get it going on my system. I have an Asus A7V with T-Bird@800 MHZ. This would be the only drive I have connected besides my CD-Rom on the secondary channel in the slave position on the ATA/66 interface. When I connect the IBM drive to the ATA/100 interface, the BIOS detects it just fine and displays all of the drives' relative information on screen as it's booting up. But for some reason uknown to me ( or the IBM techies for that matter) when I go to partiion the drive, it doesn't recognize one logical primary partition alone, but it'll recognize a secondary partition if I split the drive in half. So I turned my attention to IBM's disk managers and still I was unable to get the drive going. Some of them wouldn't even detect the drive properly. So out of curiosity I tried setting it up on the ATA/66 interface, and I was able to create partitons without any hitches whatsoever. This led me to assume that it was perhaps a BIOS issue so I downloaded BIOS update verion 1005c. When that didn't work out I had no choice but to throw some cd's across the room and a few one inch punches at the walls. I could go into more detail if needs be, but I think this message is getting a little long so I'll cut it out. Hopefully it is enough information for someone with experience in this matter to point me in the right direction. I've looked through the forums but haven't been able to find any postings that might give me any ideas. Any suggestions would be blessedly appreciated. Thanx much

 

[Guest]

>>>>So out of curiosity I tried setting it up on the ATA/66 interface, and I was able to create partitons without any hitches whatsoever. This led me to assume that it was perhaps a BIOS issue so I downloaded BIOS update verion 1005c.<<<<

No.. that would lead me to believe there is something wrong with the promise integrated controllers. But hey.. partition it the way you want it on the ATA 66 controller and hook it up to the ATA 100 controller (with one hd and CD-Rom it wouldn't matter if you ran them off the ATA 66 controllers buuut).

And don't set the CD-Rom as a slave by itself. Set it as a master if it's by itself on the secondary channel.

***Hey I run Intel... but let's get real***

 

[Guest]

Thanx for that suggestion. Ultimatley that's what I'll have to do. Unfortunatley the fact still remains that I can't get the drive working properly on my ata/100 interface. Nobody seems to be able to tell me what the problem is.

 

[blah]

I had to return the A7V and get KT7 because of that, have the same drive and had too many nerves lost with trying to get mobo to work with it. The only way I could get it to work right was to set it on the primary 66 with 33 (old) cable. But the thing is I did not buy a DeskStar to work in that condition. I could of take a A7Vpro version one and it would work fine, but I wanted to try KT7 which works fine with everything now ... hehe

K7 + KT7 + MX300 + VooDoo3000 =

 

[Guest]

Thanx for the post Blah. I'm in the market for a new mobo anyhow so it'll workout just fine. I've gotten a few grey hairs myself trying to get this thing goin, and you know, I'm only 22. So there's definetly something wrong with this picture. I may even just return the drive and get something less extravagant. ( I think that's the way it's spelled

 

[bsprawka]

Do you have the newest promise drivers. Only version 33 has worked well for me.

 

[Guest]

Do all your partitioning and formatting and installation on the ide controllers NOT the ATA100 controllers.

Once everything is installed and working as you like, hook up the drive to the ata100 controller. Ensure your bios setting selects the ata100 as the boot device.

Your system should work fine now.

If you are creating large partitions (with software such as Partition Magic) while the drive is hooked up to the ata100 controller on the a7v, you will get a ruined drive. This drive will never again work on a windows system. You will never be able to boot the os with the drive hooked up anywhere on the controllers, be it master or slave.

Your only method to solve such a dilema, is to put the drive on a Linux system and boot it. You will see there a now 60+ primary partitions which can now be deleted. THe drive once again becomes usable on a Windows system.

There is a known problem with the Promise controller on the a7v, but no fix exists for it yet. You can refer to my post "a7v and Partition Magic" for a similar discussion.

If you are just using fdisk for partitioning you may experience problems such as "bad fat table" if your drive is hooked up to the ata100 controller. If however, you hook up your large drive to the ordinary ide controllers, you should not experience any problems.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by gorenc on 02/04/01 05:48 PM.</EM></FONT></P>