Dell Dim & Promise Ultra 100 card driver conflict

[sleddriver]

I have a Dell Dimension 5150 running OEM XP sp3, with all updates as of a few days ago. I installed my Promise Ultra TX2 controller card in a PCI slot and attached an old HD with backups on it. Then booted up. The card & the HD were detected, saw XP on the screen, then chkdsk started up and the HD on the card was checked (??? not sure why), it found a couple things amiss, fixed them, XP booted, desktop came up, all looked well. (I'm not up to speed on Chkdsk at all but I'm curious what it was doing and if there is a log file somewhere it wrote to)

Then I went to device manager>SCSI & RAID controllers>WinXP Promise Ultra100 TX2 IDE controller>driver details> and see this:
Microsoft
7/1/2001
Ver 5.1.2600.5512
MS Win Comp Publisher

Wow, old. So I went to Promises' site, found a newer driver from May 2003 Ver 2.00.0.42, dwnld'd it, updated, XP said the driver wasn't 'signed', I installed anyway, then finished.

Rebooted. It hung at "Ultra BIOS unable to install because no drive is connected" or something like that. So I turned it off, disconnected the HD attached to the card, turned on, booted, XP loaded, I rolled back the driver, shut down, reconnected the drive, rebooted and everything worked fine.

I found another driver on Promises site ending in .34 and tried that one; no joy. Called Promise tech support, said driver signing made no difference, but had no explaination why a newer driver wouldn't work. He told me to use the old one from above.

I did some searching thinking perhaps this was a Dell-related thing, but didn't turn up anything conclusive.

Any thoughts?

BTW, the drive on the card is set to Master and connected to the middle connector on an 80-wire cable. I used it on an older machine to hold acronis backups. It doesn't have any OS on it.

 

[PandaBear]

BIOS is something that is on the card or the motherboard, used for detecting stuff before the OS is loaded. Was the hang after Windows start loading? or at the text BIOS screen?

If it is after windows start loading, that means it is the driver, not tested well or developed well, or not designed for your card at all. Drivers are just software written by human, they can have bugs just like other software too.

If a new driver isn't fixing any particular problem, just stick with the older driver.

 

[sleddriver]

Originally Posted By: PandaBear
BIOS is something that is on the card or the motherboard, used for detecting stuff before the OS is loaded. Was the hang after Windows start loading? or at the text BIOS screen?

If it is after windows start loading, that means it is the driver, not tested well or developed well, or not designed for your card at all. Drivers are just software written by human, they can have bugs just like other software too.

If a new driver isn't fixing any particular problem, just stick with the older driver.


It was before XP started loading, on the text BIOS screen. So this wasn't a driver issue, eh? So something in the cards BIOS could have caused it to hang? Or something in the MB's BIOS that didn't like the card?

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: sleddriver
It was before XP started loading, on the text BIOS screen. So this wasn't a driver issue, eh? So something in the cards BIOS could have caused it to hang? Or something in the MB's BIOS that didn't like the card?


In theory a bios shouldn't be affected by the driver, because driver is stored after the bios recognized the drive and starts loading from it. Windows then switch from using BIOS to using driver after the driver is loaded. In safe mode windows ignore using the driver and just use Bios the whole time, so you have no driver problem.

It is possible that windows is starting but hasn't changed to the boot logo yet, and has problem early on. If you try this driver and board on a different machine and doesn't have this problem, then you can conclude that it is the Dell Bios vs Promise driver compatibility.

Have you tried switching the parameters in the Promise bios' configuration? Usually if you have conflict and switch the parameters around (Address, IRQ, DMA, etc) it would be fine. In the days of plug and play it should all be taken care of, but this is a pretty old card, so maybe Promise missed something, or Dell thinks this card is too old it didn't even bother testing with it before releasing their bios to the factory or support site.

 

[sleddriver]

My use of 'eh?' was a poor choice of words in a typed response. What I meant was "Really? OK, I understand." My apologies. I do understand BIOS comes before XP boots and I agree with your analysis.

Not sure how to switch the parameters around. The card does work with the old driver and I'm able to use the attached drive. Just a bit puzzled why it wouldn't work with a newer driver, even though 'newer' is being used in a relative sense here.

Thanks for the response. I'll update here if I figure it out.

 

[OVERKILL]

1. That drive should be on the END of the cable. That is the MASTER location.

2. The drive detecting/not detecting has nothing to do with the driver version. It sounds like the card is having an intermittent issue with the drive.

 

[sleddriver]

You're right! Blue - Mother board; Gray - slave; Black - Master. The tech at Promise got it backwards.

Thanks!

 

[OVERKILL]

Yeah, I've been at it a few years

LOL!

Anyway, put the cable on right and then try the newest drivers again. You'll probably be fine.

 

[sleddriver]

THAT'S IT! Just putting the drive at the Master end solved the boot problem with the updated driver installed!

But, now I'm wondering...it would boot with the drive in the middle of the cable with the old driver, but not with the new driver. So by moving the drive to the end of the cable, it boots with the new driver. But we're far below the driver point because XP hasn't even begun to load yet....so this was between the card & the drive....because the boot would hang at the BIOS level when the card said there was no drive attached/detected.

OK so what I'm now fuzzy on is why the card would detect the HD at all in the middle of the cable....It would seem to have worked when it shouldn't have! I was assuming it was the driver, but that was wrong.

More dots to connect...

 

[OVERKILL]

It was just intermittent because of the mangled setup.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: sleddriver
More dots to connect...


If you keep digging enough you'll see a lot of "sort of work but sort of don't" scenarios in any software or hardware out there. If you found the right way to use it (either use the master/slave jumper or proper spot with cable select), just stick with it rather than spending your time fixing a problem that didn't really matter.

Life is too short to find solutions for a non existing problem.

 

[sleddriver]

Yeah, good point. At times,it's hard to turn off my engineer brain. The analytical engine wants to figure it all out....but hey, it works and boots, so good enough!

I installed that card in the old machine 8 or 9 years ago and it hadn't been moved since. Just forgot the details ...

Thanks!