loninappleton

I recently got a couple of Rosewill RC-200 adapter cards for use in older machines with drive channel problems that have failed or are failing.

I'd also use one of them for RAID use when these older motherboards
fail.

For now, the goal is to use the adapter card to install, at the very least,
one cdrom/dvd drive and one hard drive on a board that has only
one channel working. The ideal would be to get the dvd/cdrom and
large format hard drive off the motherboard altogether and run from the
adapter card.


After reading the manual, I don't see how to do the install procedure without
all the raid setup. Is the card just plug and play and install the drivers?


I have an Abit motherboard with AMD K-6 processor which is on a small
peer to peer network. This AMD K-6 machine will not recognize a large
hard disk under Windows 98se. I currently have a 30G on it which is quite old and likely to fail at some point. The cdrom on that one is functioning
from the motherboard with drive attached.

What steps are necessary to install the Rosewill and replace with a larger
drive of 120G?


I have an MCI Slot One motherboard (Hello Joe) which was apparently
used with SCSI media. The board would not recognize any of my IDE
drives. Would installing a Rosewill RC-200 adapter bypass the onboard
IDE? Can a DVD drive run from the Rosewill? (I've heard that removable
media do not work well with the Rosewill cards.)


Lastly I have Tyan Trinity board with only one cn\hannel working. It's booting
from a 15G Western Digital and has a floppy drive attached. The goal is to get cdrom/dvd and at least one hard drive running by using the Rosewill
adaptor. I have 2 total of the Rosewill cards and will be using these procedures as needed when motherboards fail. To get anything going on this
Tyan, I'll have to install a cdrw on the one working board channel to install
drivers. How should I proceed from there? Is it just plug and play? The operating system on the Tyan is Win2k pro.


In reading reviews of the Rosewill, turning off IDE on the motherboard was
mentioned? Is that necessary and how is it done in the BIOS?


One of these old rigs might be dedicated to just defragging large drives. I do not have a firm plan to run all the systems at once but mention was made that the Rosewill can dramatically impove defrag times.

smz

I have had the experience only once but still have done it to use this card. It wasn't made by Rosewill but it did use the SIS chipset which was a little screwy to find drivers for. If you didn't already have a look, http://www.rosewill.com/product/prod...?productId=429 is where you will find your card and a link for support.

As far as larger capacity drives, you will bypass the motherboard's limitation of the older bios and should be able to create larger partitions because the Rosewill card has an onboard bios of it's own. I am not to sure of how it deals with the 48bit LBA, but you may want to poke around and see if there is a firmware update. That could add additional support for larger drives. I did a quick search and came up empty but i didn't look elsewhere. As far as the operating system seeing the whole drive capacity, that is another issue. Without service packs, Pre XP SP2 operating systems should have a cap of 137gb. So even though the card can create a much larger partition, windows for instance may not see it that way. I'm not sure if you are planning on have this raid available to you for any machine that rolls your direction or what? But just remember after lifting the hardware limitation, you still have an operating system you may have to deal with.

crazijoe

Using the Rosewill controller will allow you to use large drives however the OS is another matter. You are using Win98 and this is very limited for large drives. Most apps and tools that come with Win98 are limited because, well, Win9x OSs are not a true 32bit operating systems.
http://www.hexff.com/w98_hd.php
Also noted that FAT32 partitions are slower in performance and less stable the larger they get. This is due to the larger cluster size above 8GB.
With that said Win98 is limited to only FAT32 partition and cannot see NTFS partitions.
On an older machine you may want to look at WinNT or better yet Linux.

smz

Let's also not forget about the dreaded limitation of fat32's maximum file size. Clearly with what people do today whether it's video capturing or ripping a dvd and forgetting about that split into 1gb options for the vob... That rip will fail miserably on a fat32.. Let's face it, fat32 was great when it came out since instead of a 1k file eating up 32k on the disc thanks to fat16, it would take only 4k with the standard MS partition. I've seen even smaller allocations using the partition magic software. But I would think once you exceed the 4k cluster mark, you are wasting your time with it. Win9x is clearly gone and never coming back so the need to has DOS level access to your files is becoming less and less and there is still NTFS for dos for those that feel the need for greed.

loninappleton

Today I made some progress on setting up the Rosewill. Some progress but no cigar.

I have one useable IDE channel on my old Tyan Trinity board so I put the
Sony CDRW on that for loading whatever has to be loaded.

The Rosewill cd with the drivers on it has no auto install routines that i could see but you can select for the RC200 at install time (I guess.)

Well I didn't want to do a fresh install and am practicing with an old 15G
Win2k Pro drive and a 120G Win98 backup I have. The 15G is a Maxtor and the
120G is a Seagate.


First test to get a drive recognized:

I installed the 15G Win2k drive to the blue plug on the Rosewill and have
the cdrom on the IDE channel of the motherboard.

The Rosewill recognized the drive as Set1 (2) IIRC. This install is just for
a single drive-- I am not making a Raid set and may not for some time but i wanted that functionality for the future. I used F3 to get into the Rosewill
BIOS, selected for conflict resoltion, then escaped and watch for a boot.

I got the Blue Screen message of inaccessible boot device and Win2k tried to load.

Then I hoooked up the Win98SE drivem entered the Rosewill BIOS,
selected to resolve conflicts etc. The Rosewill also saw this drive as
Set 1 (2) which I hope means only one drive installed and not something
more complex.


The Win98 drive seemed to go through a normal boot routine but I did
not configure the drive through all the discovery of components (the system
wanted the proper NIC driver installed.)

That looked like it was working.

I went back to the 15G Win2k drive and booted with Ultimate Boot CD.

That found the Win2k drive ok but it stopped at the same point of
BSOD: inaccessible drive.

If the OS has to be reinstalled I can do that.

If you can take me through the procedure of eliminating the BSOD that
would be helpful. I know there is a sticky on this issue but I did not understand it that well.

smz

yes you can't just swap hard drives in a NT, 2K, or XP environment. it was easy with dos and Win9x. Reinstalling always fixes it. There's tools that admins user such as sysprep that would possibly work for you but because you're playing with some pretty old stuff, Make it easy on yourself and install from scratch. Just have the actualy driver floppy for that card available. You may have to hit F6 on startup to load the raid drive before installing the O.S.

Take it easy.

loninappleton

Ok, thanks. I know I'm visited by a screen from the Rosewill BIOS at bootup. Hopefully a new install will smooth out the boot procedure with the device installed. I guess I'm concerned that a new install will discover where the
HDD is in the normal manner?

crazijoe

That probably will not happen. Almost guaranteed that you will need to install the controller drivers at the F6 prompt.

loninappleton

Yes, the RC-200 folder of drivers is on the cd rom and there's a floppy as well.
Shouldn't the wizard would kick in to ask for that. I'd have to look at the F6 prompt again if that's in the Rosewill initial BIOS screen. I can't recall at the moment.

The Rosewill manual also shows what I hope is a setup for a drive with data on
it and run as an 'only.' It says to select a function called 'Autorebuild.'

Does 'autorebuild' initiate a mirror transfer? How does the data from the
source drive transport to the target? I normally use Ghost to copy a
backup drive but I'm not knowing how the procedure works with the
Rosewill adapter card.
an F6 prompt to install from the floppy or the cdrom.

crazijoe

This is just a basic instructions and during the Operating system install.

At the beginning of the operating system setup, press F6 to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver.

1. When prompted, select 'S' to Specify Additional Device.

2. When prompted, insert the floppy disk you created in step 2 and press Enter.

3. At this point you should be presented with a selection for one of the controllers depending on you hardware version and configuration:

4. Highlight the selection that is appropriate for the hardware in your system and press Enter.

5. Press Enter again to continue. Leave the floppy disk in the system until the next reboot as the software will need to be copied from the floppy disk again when setup is copying files.

loninappleton

Thanks for the details.

With the Rosewill installed, setup will issue a stop error if F6 is not pressed.
This sort of an odd procedure because when you press F6 nothing happens
for a while, but it eventually kicks in and asks for the Rosewill floppy disk.

The Rosewill is up and running and I am writing from the machine.

I'm getting an odd licensing message from anti Virus program AVG Free 7.5.

It keeps telling me there is no valid license number even after I put it in by
hand. I think something is screwed where the professional version is
being downloaded rather than free, so I'm flying without a net.

I tried downloading fress, reinstalling, copying down the lic number and then
putting it in where requested. The license number came up as invalid.


The error message began to appear after the install of the Rosewill.

Other thing is I'm trying to get the HDD activity LED going. The jumper block
is square and so I'm trying to figure out which to plug it to make it work.

smz

I can't imagine the install of the Rosewill has any relationship to a license problem with AVG. I mean the only way is so far fetched it's impossible... The avg license would of had to have been corrupted on the hard drive some how during the driver install and i don't now where avg stores he key but typically in the registry... that means the registry would probably have to be hosed to be related.. it's easy to blame that card for any strange behaviors

loninappleton

I agree. I just don't know what the _free_ avg program wants an why
it's become such a pain. Something is going on with the license field
'blanking' and causing errors. I can see the problem. I just can't fix it even
by manually entering the license number which comes up as invalid. There's
always the issue of Oh's vs. Zeros too.

smz

here's the million dollar idea of the day.. uninstall it and pick another free antivirus solution... there are a few to choose from you know.. www.avast.com is quick good if you ask me. you can also get computer associates commercial product free for a year using this Microsoft referral link

personally i would use avast. AVG is really barebones if you ask me and since you have a problem with it... i think the fact you got things running on this Rosewill card was the hot ticket and the AVG is like ruining the fact that your original mission you actually succeeded in.

loninappleton

:-)

I use stuff on the bench that's so old it's fortuneate that it works at
all. So I can run an old 15G as "bait" for viruses with no damage done.
With that said, I recall one virus incident that I have ever had. And I keep good backups of my more up to date equipment.

smz

I understand where you are coming from. but what good is security on your
machine if your antivirus isn't working efficiently. it seems that program isn't a necessity to use that brand if uninstalling it fixes something that clearly can't be pinpointed down.

Here's another freebee. Just read the privacy policy so you know that some anonymous data could be shared in exchange for the kaspersky based antivirus program.

AOL Sponsored: http://www.activevirusshield.com/ant...eav/index.adp?

Avira Free: http://www.free-av.com/

Clamwin: http://www.clamwin.com/content/view/165/1/

as you can see there is no shortage of options.

As far as CA, the page I went to has this:

CA Internet Security Suite 2007 - FREE 90-Day Trial! (note this is ISS)
All the Computer Security You Need
• Prevent Theft of Personal Data
• Stops Viruses, Worms, Trojans, Spyware & more
• Prevents Hacker Attacks
• Blocks Pop-ups

Windows XP Only
CA Anti-Virus 2007
FREE 1-Year Trial

loninappleton

CA was offering some too-good-to-be-true deal over at Tiger Direct: CA anti virus and an NEC dvdrw for
$9.99.

Cost before the $90 dollar rebate was $108 to get
a 10 dollar dvdrw.

That kind of rebatehell just sounded ridiculous.

Anyway back to the Rosewill. I set up a slightly larger disk with it. I learned that the 40G I had
on the shelf was still good. After all those blue screen errors I had pitched it, but tried it again
since I could feel it with my hand at least taking
power.

I set up avast.

The thing that remains is the HDD activity LED
block on the card. I still can't see disk activity with
the motherboard/case HDD LED plugged into the
card.

If I am looking at the card on the component side
with the blue and red 40 pin plugs at the top
and the tail of the of the card to the 'right'
let's say that the 4 pins are

1 2
3 4

The HDD LED has an orange and white wire.

What is the logical connection? There are so many
possibilities: orange to 1, white to 2, white to one orange to 2 and then vertical or horizontal arrangement possibilities besides.

The red disk drive socket is for drive 1 and that's where the HDD is hooked up. The manual just shows where the jumper block is located-- no pin assignments either. Right now the thing is unplugged. I tried a couple guesses but wasn't getting anywhere.

What's anybodies' best guess?

smz

Oh ya. I saw that nutty combo promotion with the drive. Now go read the fine print on the rebate. Like all rebates "they are not responsible for usps losing your submission, etc"

That has got to be one of the lamest deals I've seen in a long time.

loninappleton

Will this one is solved anyway:


On the Rosewill, Pin One = White
Pin Two = Orange


HDD LED is activatd but it is still pretty dim. Better than nothing tho.