Ralph, I just read your message, and since I previously used a Promise card for about 2-years with my ZIP-250 drive , the latest card is ULTRA 66 and no problems, I was just curious as to what kind of ZIP problems you were having when using the Promise card. I am no longer using my ZIP drive or the Promise card since I went to an External USB 2.0 HD. As you mention, the ZIP was always listed as a SCSI device, now I understand WHY!!!
Ed -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 3:45 PM Subject: Re: PCWorks: free memory problem - in addition, a question about IDE extender cards Gerry, After reading your info with regard to my questions, I ended up calling Promise with trying to find some answers to some of the issues that I have run into with their Ultra100 Tx2 card. When I tried using the card previously, I seemed to have problems with windows recognizing any device connected to it except a hard drive. Since it was supposed to let you connect any Atapi device to it without a problem, and get seen by windows, this bothered me to no end. After talking to their tech support, I have a much greater understanding of this card, and at the same time, a somewhat disturbing situation which never was really discribed in their documentation about the card. Seems the card bios is a scsi based operation. One thing I tried to do with it was to boot my system with connecting my hard drives to it - the system said it found no drives, so I went back to putting the drives on the regular IDE bus connectors. So I was told that if you want to boot from a drive conneted to the card, you have to go into the motherboard bios and tell it that it is to boot from a scsi device. A bigger problem was that you could NOT use any device connected to the card if you booted directly into Dos, since the device would never be seen by the Dos O/S. I rarely these days need to boot to Dos anymore - BUT I still do occationally need to, to fix some problem that can not get fixed in windows itself, such as windows not booting properly. The BIG problem comes to disaster recovery software such as Drive Image, Backup My PC, and similar, since they all seem to need to boot from a floppy to native Dos to restore the system. No wonder I had the problems I had when I tried to boot to Dos and both my CD based drives were connected to the Promise card! What a mess when the Zip drive was connected! Since I want to use the Promise card to run a 2nd hard drive, hopefully I can get things to work properly in both Win98SE as well as Win2K. On another note, I hope you can explain to me something I have never fully understood these days, again after talking to the support person at Promise - bus speed specs. My new computer has a P4 1.7 GHz motherboard with DDR memory speed of 266. It can support ATA drives rated at 33, 66, 100. BUT when you look at the actual bus speed the board to really running at, it is actually 66 MHz, or so I read. What I dont understand is if the processor and memory can run at the speeds they can work at, and it can support an ATA-100 drive, WHY in the world are it and other motherboards transmitting data through the bus at a much lower rate???? I could understand things in the much earlier days of computers, since the processors and memory as well as drives operated at quite slow speeds - BUT these days, with devices operating at the speeds you see them capable of, the bus speed seems much slower than it should be. With all the advances in the whole electronic and computer fields, WHY in the world are motherboards behind like they seem to be???? Ralph Gerald E. Boyd wrote: > > At 11:42 AM 8/22/2002 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote the following: > > Promise IDE controller cards are almost exactly the ones I described. These > cards invariably caused MS-DOS compatibility mode problems. For example, > see http://support.promise.com/techsupport/Faq/MaxII.htm > > Your comments are probably exact, that is older PCs, Windows 95/98, and IDE > drives. > Q130179 - Troubleshooting MS-DOS Compatibility Mode on Hard Disks > http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q130179 > > Q151911 - MS-DOS Compatibility Mode Problems with PCI IDE ... > http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q151911 > -- > Gerry Boyd ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
