Interesting Promise Ultra66 behavior

[Greg-]

Greetings,

I'd be curious if anyone else has experienced this or can come up with an explanation.

I put a Promise Ultra66 controller in my system and it is almost working like I thought it would. Here are the consistent strange things. For Windows 95 to boot I cannot have any hard drives on the motherboard IDE channels, all hard drives must be attached to the Ultra66. I can boot off the Ultra66 fine, but as soon as I put one hard drive on a motherboard IDE channel, I get the blank screen blinking cursor after system and Promise bios loads. The cdrom works fine off motherboard IDE. Now back to all hard drives on the Ultra66 and cdrom on motherboard IDE, if I now try to boot up off floppy drive it will start to read the files off the floppy and do autoexec.bat and make it look like it's working but then it also continues on and boots up windows 95 off the bootable drive attached to the Ultra66. Bios boot sequence is set to pick up the floppy first. I have to disconnect the bootable hard drive from the Ultra66 then boot from floppy for it to work right and get the A: prompt. Then I tried putting all hard drives on the motherboard IDE channels and placed the cdrom drive on the Ultra66. The Ultra66 bios did not pick up the cdrom drive and the Promise bios did load. Then windows 95 started to boot up but hung when the cdrom drivers would not load.

I wanted to have one hard drive and the cdrom on the motherboard IDE channels - each as a master, one on primary, one on secondary. Then I wanted to have two hard drives on the Ultra66 - each as master on its own IDE channel. According to what I've read about the Ultra66 controller I should be able to do this shouldn't I??

The Ultra66 controller shipped with bios version 1.14 (build 0728) and drivers version 1.42. I downloaded the most recent bios and drivers from the Promise web site - that was drivers version 1.43 and interestingly enough bios version 1.13 (build 0611) - a lower version number than what shipped with it. What I described above was accomplished with both bios versions and both driver versions. There are no conflicts or IRQ issues.

Let me give the standard system rundown:
Intel AN430TX motherboard with onboard Yamaha audio.
Intel P233MMX cpu
64 Mbytes SDRAM DIMMs - 32 Mbytes in both slots
Matrox Mystique 220 with Rainbow Runner Studio
Video drive - WD136AA 13.6G hard drive
System drive - WD AC14300 4.3G
Other drive - Quantum Fireball ST 4.3G
Promise Ultra66 controller
Cyberdrive 12x cdrom
Windows 95 OSR2.1

Thanks for your time,

Greg

[DJ]

I am not sure you did this but in
order to boot from the onboard IDE
Channel, set the drive types to Auto
so that the drive can be detected and
then it will boot. In this profile you
will have access to all drives on the
system. If you want to boot from the
Ultra66, set drive types to none or not
installed however you will only have
access to those hard drives on the Ultra.
You will still have access to your CD ROM
although it is connected to the onboard IDE
channel.

DJ

[Mark F]

To boot from the Promise controller, set your BIOS to boot from SCSI. That's how it and windows sees the Promise Ultra66s.

Mark F.

------------------
OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a CD

[Greg-]

Thanks for your input,

DJ, I do have drive types set to auto in system bios setup. The kicker is that if I have drives on both the Ultra66 and motherboard IDE at the same time, it will not boot at all. Just the blinking cursor. As soon as I put all drives on the Ultra66, boots fine, cdrom works on motherboard IDE just fine.

Mark F, in system bios boot sequence entries, I have one that is "bootable addin card". To boot from the Ultra66 I have moved that one to appear second, right after the floppy. With this I can boot from the Ultra66. I'd like to be able to put hard drives on both motherboard IDE and the Ultra66 and have it be able to boot at all - that's the one thing I cannot get to work. The best I can come up with is all hard drives on the Ultra66, cdrom only on motherboard IDE, boot from Ultra66. That combination works fine, it's just puzzling why it all locks up as soon as I want a hard drive on motherboard IDE along with having drives on the Ultra66.

Thanks for your time so far on this, if you or anyone else has any additional thoughts on why this may be happening, I'd love to hear from you.

Greg

[Rick6612]

Hi Greg,

I haven't used a Promise Ultra66, but I used to use a Promise Ultra33, and so did a friend of mine. We both had a lot of different problems because of incompatibilities between the motherboard BIOS and the Ultra33 BIOS. We both had to get multiple BIOS upgrades (and on the Ultra33, that meant promise had to send out a new chip!).

My friend never got the Ultra33 to work in his machine and finally had to throw it away. I got it to work in my machine, but it really never worked quite right.

I finally bought a Promise Fast Trak, and that has worked perfectly straight out of the box.

Anyway, the problems you describe sure sound like incompatibility problems between your motherboard and the Ultra66.

Rick

[Greg-]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for that input on your experience with the Ultra33 controller. I have my motherboard bios up to the most recent version, and I've tried two versions of Ultra66 bios. I have an email in to Promise on this, I'll have to ask about pending bios updates to see if I might stand a chance on that end. If anyone else is seeing anything similar, I'd love to hear about it. At least it feels much better to get rid of that "Am I the only person on planet earth who has run into this" feeling.

Greg

[dchip]

I think when I first built my system (which includes Promise Ultra 66) I tried something similar to what you're trying. I remember dozens of reboots and safe-mode boots. Anyway, It never worked. I knew my system was seeing the Promise card as a SCSI controller and that the Promise bios was notifying my system that on that card would be the boot drive. The system would not boot if it found another HDD elsewhere. I finally asked myself why I even wanted to put a HDD anywhere else other than my fast new Ultra 66 (which can handle up to four HDD's comfortably). I had no real reason. Now I have HDD on Promise and all CD ROM on motherboard and the fastest-booting, fastest-running most stable system I've ever had. I hope you end up finding a solution, but, right now you have the solution in your hands. Best of luck.

[Greg-]

Thanks for the information, looks like I have ended up with the same solution that you have with all hard drives on Ultra66 and all cdrom on motherboard. Thanks for the confirmation of this being a stable solution to the problem!