What to do after installing Promise ATA100 TX2

Tom · Tue Mar 20, 2007 9:09 pm

I have a Daewoo CB641X-BX with Award bios 4.51. Searched here and was thinking about doing the bios flash to get past 32gb but a little afraid. Also decided I would like to get more speed out of the system. I had added a USB 2.0 card and the difference was noticeable. So, I have a Promise ATA100 TX2 non-raid on the way from ebay.
I had trouble getting the drive to format with XP home. Future son-in-law zeroed out the drive info or something and I was able to get the drive installed as long as it is jumpered to 32gb according to the Seagate Ultra ATA/100 Quick start quide. Works very nicely but am looking forward to gettin ghte full 120gb recognized. Long,sorry, here's my question and best guess of how to proceed.
1. What I've learned says to put in the card, boot the system and let XP install the card, possibly having to provide a Promise update.
2. Shut down and reconfigure the cables using the new 80 wire cables. I plan to have the oldest cd on the motherboard with the old 40 wire cable, the Seagate HD on channel 1 of the Promise and a Samsung 52-32-52 CDRW on channel 2 both using 80 wire cables.
3. Power on and go into Bios to change something. Not sure if this is only boot sequence or something else.

So what happens if this is successful. Can I just pull the 32gb jumper now and finish formatting the drive. Will it be a reinstall?

Any help orpointers to links I've missed is appreciated. Thanks Tom

Tue Mar 20, 2007 9:41 pm

Once you pull the jumper 2 things might happen. Windows can now see the remaining drive space, you can put a seperate partition on that, format it and use as seperate drive letter. You might be able to use something like Powerquest Partition Magic to resize the partition to 120GB but I can't guarantee this will work.

In any case, chances are you need to reinstall windows because you changed the boot controller where your windows system disk is on. This is usually enough to knock XP off its feet.

Wed Mar 21, 2007 7:25 pm

since you're using Windows XP you can use the full capacity even with the 32GB clip jumper installed. just make sure to install SP2 and create a new partition for the remaining space.
the promise controller will give some extra speed though.

Tom · Fri Mar 23, 2007 9:31 pm

I just got the card today 3/23 and it will be a few days before I can try the installation. Will update here my experience. Thanks guys.

Tom · Mon Mar 26, 2007 10:46 pm

Thanks for the replies. I put the card in without connecting the hard drive and booted the computer. Then I let windows install the new hardware from the "add new hardware" routine. Shut down and swithed the hard drive off the motherboard cable which also has the two cd drives and using the 80 wire cable connected the hard drive to the controller. On bootup changed the sequence but don't think that was neccessary. Drive was recognized as the 32gb drive. Everything seemed fine and then when doing AVG and Adaware scans the system would die like it lost communication with the program. I had serveral IRQ's and hangs etc. After a lot of playing I installed the Promise driver as a replacement for what XP used from Microsoft. One of the hang errors was also the microsoft driver. When booting with the promise driver it went through a new sequence flashing the Promise label and id'ing the hard drive.
Anyway still had hangs and fooled with the bios settings and XP for system hibernate etc. Also found some programs I wasn't sure that I had downloaded during this serveral day time frame. ( Web IQ and some things.)
I don't think the INTerrupts have reoccurred since a lot of my changes. System was still slower than before putting the board in. Believe it or not but a simple drive defrag got my speed back up and things look fine.
I did pull the jumper and the Dick Management as well as the Promise shows the full 111gb (120gb drive) DMA 5. Disk Management shows 80bg unformatted.
Anyway just an update. Haven't decided whetther to reinstrall everything yet or not. Have some work that is computer dependent so it may be a while before I decide.

Tue Mar 27, 2007 11:56 pm

Interesting it now shows the rest of the disk as free space, wasn't sure how it would react. You can either make another drive-letter (and a seperate partition) or use something like powerquest partition magic (now symantec) to stretch it to the full size of the disk. But that's up to you.

Thank you for sharing your experiences with us. I think I just saw a new migration method for a harddisk between two dissimilar chipset systems...