A-Bit HotRod Pro 100 & WinXP Pro, DMA enabled?

[GokuFurinji]

I've just installed this PCI addin card (High-Point chip) in a friends A-Bit BE6-II to get him upto ATA/100 as his mobo only supports ATA/66 via the onboard Hight-Point controller! I have also disabled the onboard Primary/Secondary IDE so the ATA/66 controller won't be detected in XP.

The problem is, as the device is detected as a SCSI device, and so is the Hard Drive (IBM Telesto 40GB ATA/100)! I can't tell if DMA is enabled as the Advanced tab is not available in the 'IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers' as there is no Primary/Secondary channel enabled!

The card itself is set to the correct DMA mode 5 via the onboard BIOS, but the drives performance in WinXP is SLOW, which leads me to believe DMA is either unavailable or not enabled! I've tried updating to the latest driver/BIOS from High-Point's site (has XP drivers in package), but the BIOS gives me a BSOD when booting XP, as does the BIOS from A-Bit's site as well? The drivers seem to install without a problem, just the BIOS crashes XP.

How can I tell if/enable DMA in WinXP for this card?

 

[Toejam31]

In my opinion, upgrading a mainboard with an on-board controller that supports ATA/66 to a PCI ATA/100 controller card is a complete waste of time and money. The performance gain is negligible, and most of that is in the drive's theoretical burst rate. And I have never yet seen a single IDE drive reach the 100 MB/sec allowed by the interface. And I can guarantee you that the IBM Telesto 75GXP series drive your friend owns also will not reach that limit, even you get the card successfully installed.

I would take the card out, and leave my friend's system alone, if I were you. That would certainly eliminate the BSOD's.

That may not be what you hoped to hear, but it's good advice, nevertheless.

And that's my opinion, for what it's worth.

You never did mention which PCI card you were attempting to install. HighPoint makes several controller cards, most of which are IDE RAID.

Sometimes if something ain't broke ... don't fix it.

Toejam31

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[GokuFurinji]

Which controller? A-Bit Hot Rod 100 Pro: HPT370 chipset, Raid 0, Raid 1, Raid 0 + 1.

Thanks for the advice? All I want to get working is DMA, the fact that theoretical limits will never be attained is simply not relevant! The only time I get a BSOD is when I flash the BIOS in the Hot Rod. Reflashing back to the original BIOS stops the BSOD!

Maybe I should rephrase:

"How do I enable DMA under Win XP Pro for an A-Bit Hot Rod 100 Pro PCI IDE Addin card?"

 

[Toejam31]

Kind of you to include the specifications on the card in this post.

Actually, I DID think the information I posted was relevant, but that's your choice.

There was no need to disable the onboard IDE. These controllers are designed to co-exist with the IDE controller that is already present.

Questions:

Have you set the boot order in the BIOS to SCSI first?
Have you accessed the setup menu in the card's BIOS? (CTRL + h). The card should automatically detect the correct DMA settings for the hard drive, and this is where they are listed.
Is the hard drive in the mainboard BIOS CMOS setup listed as "NONE"?

Here is a <A HREF="http://driver.am.nthu.edu.tw/vendor/ABIT/manual/english/ha100.pdf" target="_new">link</A> to the online manual, which is a .pdf file.

If that link isn't functional, try <A HREF="http://fae.abit.com.tw/eng/download/dlmanual.php?name=HotRod_100_Pro&file=ha100.pdf" target="_new">here</A>.

In my experience, (for whatever that is worth), a hard drive functions best when repartitioned and formatted while connected to a new controller card. For example, I have seen hard drives that could not be properly recognized until this is done when switching to a Promise card. This also allows you to install the latest drivers for the card during the beginning of the operating system installation, which is accomplished by pressing F6 during the boot into text-mode Setup.

I would recommend this, especially with an operating system like Win2K or WinXP, so that the mass-storage driver can be loaded into memory during the installation, right from the start.

Toejam31

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____________________________________________________________

<font color=purple>"Procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."</font color=purple>

 

[GokuFurinji]

Ok, got off on the wrong foot a bit! Sorry for the 'tone' of the post, your experience has not simply been dismissed but It's generally agreed that 'NO' ATA-66/100 IDE drive attains anywhere near it's quoted performance, so I stated that was not relevant to my problem, if you took that as a simple dismissal, then I'm sorry.

The reasoning behind my suspecting DMA is not enabled is that the new IBM drive is performing similar to the drive it replaced (an 800mb WD), I would expect much better performance from the IBM drive!

The BIOS is indeed set to boot SCSI first and the card is set to UDMA mode 5. The card was also installed long before installing XP and was also formatted/partitioned while connected to it! However, the F6 option was not used during the installation of XP, but if you think using this option would be better then I'll try re-installing XP and using the latest A-Bit Hot Rod drivers, just have to convince my friend it's necessary and when it can be done, he may not agree though, but that's up to him!

If that does not work, I will be back where I started