Guess I'm not quite done yet...
I have only one HD. WD80gb, SE.... Connected it to the Promise IDE connector in the lower right of the board, reserving the other two IDE connector higher up for optical drives -5Shot
First, as you probably know, each IDE port can support 2 drives: a master and a slave. It's unlikely you'd be using two optical drives
at the same time unless you're planning to do bulk CD burning; this is more a job for SCSI, where you can have enough drives. So go ahead and strap your existing drive as master and plug the long end into the uppermost (black) SEC IDE connector on the mobo. When you get a second drive, strap it as slave and hook it to the slave connector on this same cable. Be sure your cable's not in backwards, and the farthest drive (master) goes to the farthest cable connector.
Second, I assume by "SE" you mean "Special Edition"-- is that the 7200rpm 80GB Caviar drive? Maximum ATA speed for that drive is 100, so you will not gain any speed advantage by hooking it to an ATA133 port anyway, plus you'd be clogging your PCI bus! So do the same strap/cable thing for your WD, but hook it to the mobo's middle blue (PRI IDE) port which, like the SEC, comes off the ICH5R Southbridge and bypasses the PCI bus. If you use an 80-conductor ATA-66 rated cable here, you'll get maximum throughput from your WD. Don't use older 40-pin cables. ATA-66 cables also handle 100 and 133, but there's hardly any 133 drives (e.g. Maxtor 6Y160P0).
...Connected it to the Promise IDE connector... I have not been able to get the computer to recognize the HD. It does recognize it in the boot up process, but does not show up in the boot priority screen, nor the IDE configuration screen, nor does XP install find it. -5Shot
I haven't actually tried booting off a Promise, but these are some ideas to try. First some background...
On the BIOS Setup Main screen, they list only Southbridge ICH5R devices: Primary IDE Master, Slave, Secondary IDE Master, Slave --these are all pretty obvious and relate to those upper 2 IDE connectors. Then they list Third IDE Master and Fourth IDE Master --For the P4C800-E Deluxe, these are your upper two SATA ports "SATA1" and "SATA2" respectively.
The lower two SATA ports, "SAIA RAID1" and "SATA RAID2" --plus the lowermost (blue) 133 port-- are all on the Promise. The Promise BIOS knows what it's got hooked up to it, and your Setup program comes up
after the Promise has had a chance to scan its drives. But none of your Promise devices will appear on the Main screen. Where they
do show up is in your Boot-- Hard Disk Drives screen. There will be an entry for "1st Drive", "2nd Drive", etc. which you can cursor up/down to highlight, then either (a)hit "+/-" to cycle through values, or (b)hit Enter which opens a popup from which you can use cursor up/down to choose a drive from the list then hit Enter again to set. Drives on your Promise will be listed like "SATA378 TX2plus D0" (I don't have a HD on the 133 port to compare to), and drives on your Southbridge will be listed like "PM- Maxtor 6Y160P0", "3M- Maxtor 6Y160M0" where "PM" is for Primary Master, "3M" is for "Third Master" and so on. You may already know all this.
Now, that HDD list is
supposed to "specify the Boot device priority sequence from available Hard drives" (note they're only talking about HD's here, not CD's too). So here, make your desired Promise HD appear as the "1st Drive". With only one HD, your other "Drive" fields should all be set to "Disabled".
Finally, the "Boot Device Priority" screen lets you control booting amongst your
dissimilar devices. You only get three device choices: Floppy, CD, and one HD: whatever you listed for "1st Drive" earlier should appear there. You don't get a choice of multiple HD's here, so you need to position your Promise HD as "1st Drive". Hitting "+/-" here toggles amongst only a few fixed patterns; I had to set mine to CD-Flop-HD to get the XP CD to load (Flop-CD-HD didn't work).
To test the Promise thing, I changed my "1st Drive" to one of my Promise drives, set the others to "Disabled" then went back to the Priority screen. That Promise drive now showed up as one of the choices. Try it!
...with the ATA133 HD installation. I hooked it up to the promise controller and tried to install WinXP and the installation CD wouldn't recognize the drive. -dmaljunk
Well as I said I haven't actually tried booting off a Promise. But the other reason for your problem might be because XP can't see the Promise controller until after you've installed XP drivers for it, and this can't happen until XP is up. So we have a little chicken-and-egg problem.
On mine, after I first loaded XP, I went into the Control Panel-- System-- Device Manager and there the Promise showed up as a yellow "(!)". Only after loading the drivers, did it show up properly. THEN I could format the HD's on it.
So if the BIOS thing discussed above doesn't let XP install directly onto a Promise drive, then maybe the driver thing is what's biting both of you. You would need to temporarily attach your HD to a Southbridge port so you can load XP to it, and thus have a way to put on the Promise drivers. Then indeed you should be able to move it... AND change your BIOS Boot settings accordingly. Note you can download 3 drivers from the
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe download site for the Promise --one ATA driver and 2 versions of RAID driver (if you click on the ALL tab). For non-RAID you want the one called "Promise FastTrak 378 ATA Driver" for WinXP (not Win2003). Runs fine.
Microsoft seems to adapt over time, so I'm sure that
someday it won't be this way, there'll be an XP-SP2 or SP3 that knows how to work with Promise-spiced mobo's. (Maybe
this is what I remembered reading about before...?)
Hope this helps get you going, :bandit:
-clintfan
