Promise ULTRA TX2 install problems...

[soulpilot]

Hello everybody,

I am hoping that someone can offer some suggestions. I have an older system that I would like to slowly upgrade...for the time being I am stuck with this.

I have searched the forums, there were some references to ULTRA TX2, but nothing that could really help me.

Ultra TX2 installation problems, seem to be related to memory resources conflict, with the video card (?) primarily.
No problem with IRQ (COM1 & COM2 had been disabled all along, so I have had 2 - 3 free IRQ's available)

System specs:

- Win98SE
- PII300
- Gigabyte 686LX motherboard (ATA33 on-board controller)
- BIOS rev. 2.4c supporting up to 40G drives
- PCI 2.1
- 192 MB SDRAM
- recently new Seagate 7200.7 40G ATA100 drive (has been running great on on-board IDE)
- 3COM 905-PTO network card
- ATI Rage Pro 8MB AGP video card
- Voodoo 2 PCI video card
- Soundblaster soundcard (ISA - I know, don't laugh, does the job ;-))

I wanted to utilize the ATA100 capability of the Seagate drive, by adding
the Promise Ultra TX2 controller.

- initial try per ULTRA TX2 instructions - system hanged after win boot menu (which I left enabled)
- could boot into 'SAFE' mode
- repeated using different PCI slots - same result

Connected drive back to on-board IDE controller, removed TX2
- prepared boot diskette with latest TX2 bios and drivers
- removed all other cards
- reinstalled TX2 and updated bios - OK
- booted OK, detected TX2, and installed drivers from diskette
- rebooted to desktop - video card conflict with ULTRA TX2 and 'system board exension for PnP extension'
- SCSI controller (TX2) 'yellow' - memory conflict with video card and 'system board exension for PnP extension'
- manually set the I/O and memory addresses for the TX2 to 'no conflict' addresses
- TX2 refreshed to OK
- rebooted
- video card still has memory conflict with 'system board exension for PnP extension' - cannot change this manually

- tried the above in different PCI slots - still having same conflicts

Seems like the vid card and the TX2 don't like each other. Fighting for the same space(??)

Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thank you.

sp

 

[jsauce]

Is your BIOS set to allow the OS to plug and play? Obviously there is a conflict there, you may either one try and make sure the bios is set to plug and play to allow widnows to set all the irqs and such or try and manually setup the device resources for the PCI slots in the bios, so they are fixed when they get to windows. Try to root out the conflicts there.

John D. Saucier
jsauce@magicguild.com
Certified Technician
Network Administrator

 

[pcell]

I had a similar problem w/ an old Win98 300 MHz system & a (no name) ULTRA ATA PCI controller w/ a promise BIOS. Don't recall what I did exactly to get it working, but it took several days & was exhaustive. BUT, afterwards there were multiple issues: I couldn't upgrade my video card (conflicts), I had problems w/ maybe every second USB device I worked with & I couldn't boot to the drive I was controlling in DOS mode.

Last year I replaced the card with a Maxtor Ultra ATA PCI controller ( & upgraded to XP ) - all issues disappeared. Still using the box.

 

[soulpilot]

Thank you jsauce and pcell for your suggestions.

I have tried both PnP and manual device resources setup...still same problem.

I am starting to think that maybe I will just forget it, especially if there may be other problems and issues even if I am able to get the TX2 to work.

It appears lot of other people have had numerous problems with the TX2. I might give it one more try...failing that, just hold off till I get a new mobo/CPU and redo the whole box.

Thank you again for your input.

sp