More than 4 IDE/ATA-100 devices under XP?

[Guest]

Here's something odd. I have 3 hard drives running on my promise ATA-100 controller - one master with a slave on 0 and 1 respectively, and a master on 2. I have a CDR/RW running on the primary IDE, and my DVD-ROM on the secondary IDE.

This setup disables both my CDR/RW and DVD-ROM under windows XP. The funny thing is this: they show up fine and for all intensive purposes, appear to be operational in the device manager. They show up in explorer, as well. However, I went to install a few games last night, and they would not register that I had even inserted a cd. To get them working, I disabled my third hard drive (ata-100 2) and now everything works fine.

If anyone has run into similar problems or knows a workaround to XP's inability to handle more than 4 IDE/ATA-100 devices, I would appreciate it very much.

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AMD Athlon T-Bird 1.2ghz
768mb PC-133 SDRAM
ASUS A7V KT-133
Hercules nVidia GeForce2 MX
Soundblaster Live! Platinum
2x WD 40gb HD
1x WD 20gb HD
HP 9100 CDR/RW
Pioneer DVD-ROM
Windows XP Home Ed.

 

[Lars_Coleman]

If you dis-connect one of the Cd Rom drives do you get the same outcome? It could just be that stand alone hard drive on the RAID controller. Have you tried setting it to a slave instead of a master? What about trying it on the motherboard controllers instead of the RAID controllers?

I can't say for sure in Windows XP, but I'm running Windows 2000 with 5 IDE devices (2-CD Roms & 3-hard drives), and don't seem to have any problems what so ever ...

<font color=red>BIOS updates do wonders ....</font color=red>

 

[mbetea]

i have 4 harddrives then a cdrom and cdburner. everything fuctioned fine (used xp to trouble shoot, but it wasn't the problem).