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UltraATA/133 Maxtor compatibility issue with PCI I/O card

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enoxy7z

Technical User
Mar 30, 2005
8
CA
I recently purchased a 250GB MAXTOR DIAMONDMAX 10 Ultra16 UltraDMA ATA/133 hard drive for my Dell Dimension 4100. I knew prior that my motherboard supported up to ATA/100 but I read that there was no compatibility issues with this. I installed the drive, formatted with NTFS and split the drive into two 125GB partitions. The drive worked perfectly until I tried copying large (500MB+) files from my 40GB drive to the new 250GB drive. Every time it would stop part way and give a write error message then the drive letters would disappear until the system was rebooted. I decided to buy a PCI controller card that fully supported UltraDMA ATA/133 so that I could use the drive to its full potential. The chipset on my new PCI to IDE card is Silicon Image Sil0680. I hooked up the drive to the PCI card, installed the latest drivers and still have the same issues. Are there any ways around this?
 
Run the diagnostics at the HD manuf's site to see if there's a problem with the drive.
 
Not totally sure on this but it seems to me this issue may have already been addressed here in another thread and so the answer may be there as well.



Good advice + great people = tek-tips
 
I've run the PowerMax diagnostic program and no errors came up. I skimmed through dozens of pages of threads and none seem to cover my exact issue. All that I found out was that ATA133 is backwards compatible with ATA100 motherboards.
 
Since i'm the one who brought it up i will have a look.
It had to do with someone having a problem with transferring very large files from one hard drive to another. Sorry, guess i should have located it first.



Good advice + great people = tek-tips
 
I'm sorry, i have done the same thing, cant find it.
Could have been another site. I will keep trying. If i dont report back its because i couldnt find it.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips
 
Much appreciated! I will look more as well.
 
Also, i found this:

Its way over my head.
Either way, i am going to leave you now, someone who knows more than i do about this will help you.

Just a parting thought. You dont recall the error message or part of the error message you mentioned in your first post? That could be helpful.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips
 
The original error was just a generic Write Error message like the ones that pop-up when an A: drive disk fails.
 
If an 80-wire IDE cable was supplied with the 250 GB HD, then is this cable being used?

If so, then is it securely and correctly installed with the colored stripe along the one edge next to the power lead on the back of the HD, and next to pin 1 on the PCI card?

If that's ok, then did you try different jumper settings on the drive?

 
I am using the 80-wire cable that came with the IDE controller card. The drive is set to slave and is the only device connected to the controller card. I'll try it as a master and see if that makes a difference.
 
Also, try the CS jumper setting, if it's available.
 
You said"The drive is set to slave and is the only device connected to the controller card. I'll try it as a master and see if that makes a difference."

It certainly wont work if its the only drive on the 80 pin ide cable and you have it set as slave!!
Change it to master if its the only one on that ide cable.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips
 
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