zenobia

I'm somewhat glad and somewhat disheartened to find this post. I have been struggling with almost the same scenario. My 2nd PC is equipped with an Athlon 64 3700+ on a Tyan S2865 motherboard, with 5 IDE hd's and an IDE DVD writer. I also have the Maxtor branded Ultra 133 controller (actually the same as the Promise Ultra 133 TX2) installed in order to run the additional HD's. The Maxtor controller is only being used for storage drives, not bootable. Here is what happens:

1) If the controller is plugged in, but with no drives attached, Windows (in this case Win2k8) boots fine.
2) If the controller is plugged in, but with drives attached, the bootup process fails shortly after the text screen shows up for the Maxtor controller indicating it found the HD's successfully. The bootup process just hangs at a black screen.
3) If I reset at this point, I *do* get the "Windows failed to start" screen which gives me options, but any one of those fails immediately afterwards at, guess what? A black screen.
4) Trying to boot from Windows setup disks or certain live cd's causes the black screen to appear and the bootup process fails.

I have tried all the following troubleshooting:

1) Verified all connections, jumpers, and verified the HD's do work.
2) Verified all BIOS settings, including boot orders.
3) Updated the controller's BIOS to the latest revision available from Promise (According to one troubleshooter, that solved this exact problem but did not for me.)
4) Removed anything extra from the PC not needed for bootup purposes
5) Switched PCI slots

More interesting facts:

1) This setup worked previously in an older motherboard/cpu setup, running under Ubuntu 7.10
2) Running a Ubuntu livecd (8.04) works perfectly. Ubuntu sees all the HD's and can access them, no problemo.

I am stumped. I have searched and searched for solutions. All I find are dead-end threads with other people explaining this same problem but with no solutions.

Any ideas?