From: "Bradley Marden" :Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2001 3:30 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] ata100 card


> I have a ata100 pci card with a 30gb western digital ata 100 hard drive. I also have a Asus DVD-ROM on a system with a 500 mhz amd k6-2. A asus p5-a mb and 358 mb of ram. I put the card into the system in a pci slot with the hard drive in the master slot and the dvd-rom in the secondary slot both set to master. Then on the mb i have a CD-RW drive set as slave on the secondary slot. The problem is when i am running programs either from the harddrive or from the dvd-rom (ie. games) i get errors or it will lock up. It is not centered on one or two programs it is all of them. I thought that i might have corrupted windows when i put in the card so i tried reinstalling windows with the card in it. While installing windows ME i began getting errors. I would format and start over when i received the errors. I finaly installed windows without any errors so i thought everything was okay. But it was not the end to the errors. I don't know what to do anymore. I have pulled out the card and everything works okay know, no errors, but the motherboard wont allow the hard drive or the dvd-rom to run any faster than 33bytes per second. I tried moving the card to anther slot to see if that fixes it, but that did not work. If anyone has any other sugestions i would be greatful. I have a SB live 5.1 sound card in one pci slot, one us robotics modem in the isa slot, and an ATI 64mb radeon video card in the AGP slot. Is there a particular slot that i should have the ATA Card in or the sound card should be in?
> 
> help please
> 
> Bradley Marden
> [log in to unmask]
> 

Bradley,

What kind of ATA 100 card did you install?  The Highpoint controller has been known to have problems with some drives causing corruption of data and MBR's.  Not all people have had these problems but I had to replace a onboard Highpoint controller with a Promise controller because of these problems.

Another item to look at is the ATA 100 card should not be sharing an IRQ with any other peripherals.  Depending on the motherboard and BIOS you may be able to assign IRQ's to PCI slots in the BIOS, to avoid sharing the ATA 100 IRQ with any other peripherals.  

The AGP port (if you have one), all of the PCI slots and USB share 4 IRQ's.  Depending on your motherboard, the AGP (if you have one) and the first pci slot usually share an IRQ.  USB will share an IRQ with one of the PCI slots and some PCI slots will share an IRQ.  Placement of your peripherals in the PCI slots will determine how the IRQ's are shared with the other PCI slots, the AGP port, and the USB controller.  If the BIOS does not support assigning IRQ's to PCI slots then you will need the Motherboard or manufacturer of your computers manual to determine how the IRQ's are assigned.  With this knowledge you would be able to determine where to place peripherals in the PCI slots so the cards that don't like to share an IRQ will not.
Hope this helps.

Mary Wolden

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