Bizarre Promise ATA/100 IDE Controller Card Problems

[MoxManiac]

Hello. I feel like a pest, as I am always posting here asking for assistance. I am sorry to be annoying. However, I have run into a unique problem when installing my new Promise ATA/100 controller card.

I installed the PCI card in the slot below my sound card, the slot where my internal modem used to reside. (Switched to external.) I then set the jumpers for my CD-ROM and CDRW both to Cable Select. I connected the CDROM to my Secondary IDE Controller on my mobo, and used another cable (Yes, a 80 wire ATA/100 cable) to hook the CDRW up to IDE 1 on the controller card.

Setup went fine. The card's BIOS showed, and detected the CDRW. I got to windows and installed the drivers. It installed fine as well. Both drives showed up in Windows as working.

I then loaded Nero and decided to test a burn. I compiled a CD of files and tried to burn them. It started up fine, and burned for awhile. Then, at about 30-40%, the PC completely froze up. I had to hit the reset button. I thought it might have been an isolated incident. I ran scandisk and rebooted again. Then I tried to burn a CD again. Same thing happened.

So I switched the CDRW to Secondary Master on my mobo, and the CDROM to the controller card. Same thing. Won't get past 40% when burning a CD without freezing.

So I removed the controller card completely and restored the drives back to their original Master/Slave configuration I had on the Secondary Master. Tried to burn a CD, worked fine. Problem dissapeared.

So obviously, the card is at fault. What am I missing? Why is it causing such a bizarre conflict with my CDRW, even when the CDRW is not on it?

I went to the promise site, and found no mention of a problem like this in any of the FAQS. I checked for BIOS and driver updates, but I already had the latest.

Any suggestions, ideas? It grabbed IRQ 11, bouncing my vid card to 10, my sb live to 3, and the via usb driver to share with ACPI bus control, or whatever it's called. It was not sharing it with any other device.

The controller model was ULTRA100 TX2 ATA/100. My CDROM is a Sony 52x. My CDRW is a Plextor 12/10/32A.

[morriswindgate]

Controller cards are only for hard drives, I have had some luck using a cd on a controller card IDE2 port, but only if a hard drive is attached to the Cards IDE1 port.

[bladerunner48]

Mox,
Morris is right. Best thing for you to do is to hook up all your
HDDs to the Promise and run you CD-Rom and CD-RW off the primary and
secondary master of your Motherboard. That is the set up I have used
since I installed my controller and everything works great. Even cured the
buffer underrun I would get (more than I would like to admit) using my old
HP 8100 CD-RW. Haven't made one coaster since I set the system up this way.

B48

[MoxManiac]

Ah. Makes sense. I'll give that a go. Thanks guys.

[sUsHIboI]

erm... speakin of being a pest, I think im da pestiest of da pests =P since i do nothin but ask dumb q's. Erm... my humble apologies every1, ill try 2 ask smarter q's =P jk