Deskpro 4000+Maxtor 40GB drive+ATA/133 controller card cannot boot W2k

[Abdullah Abulhasan]

Thank you for continuing the thread. XP is not at issue here, because, once booted, it runs better than ever with my upgrades. The ATA-133 controller and drives are completely visible to XP.

I see nothing at Microsoft describing the "boot barrier" problem with UDMA controllers on this generation of hardware.

Maxtor's utilities support the Promise controller, but they say they are still in development for allowing HDD configuration using MaxBlast when the Maxtor drives are on other third party controllers.

FMI (Fujitsu Microdevices Int'l) reps only referred me back to HP for BIOS support, so I am still at a loss.

The ATA-133 PCI card appears and is configurable in the "PCI Devices" section of the F10 Setup program, but now that the CDRW is on Port 2 of the new card, it is absent in the "Boot Order" section (A:, Network, C:, currently).

Although "C:" is present, it only boots when control is passed to it by a bootable diskette, or an El Torito CD ROM disc.
Currently, the latter method requires brokering by a third party Boot Manager program. My Deskpro's BIOS won't directly boot El Torito CDs from either controller.

[Vijayasekar Rajsekar]

Let's try the following changes:

1. Put back your CDRW drive onto your original motherboard connector. Your existing CDROM drive can be temporarily disabled or disconnected. Check if CDRW is able to read a CDROM.
2. Move your Maxtor 30 GB and 6 GB drives to first and second slots respectively on your IDE controller card. Hence your ATA card should have only 2 drives.
3. Your DP4000 6266MMX should have the latest BIOS posted in HP's website
4. In the BIOS the order of boot can be a:,c: and network
5. When the BIOS loads, it should recognise the IDE controller card. This is very important, else your 30 GB drive cannot be recognised by BIOS. This will be the C: boot drive for the BIOS.
6. The first time when you boot, it takes nearly a minute for the system to recognise that the boot drive (C:) is sitting on a controller card.
7. If these steps works correctly, try moving the CDRW drive to the controller card and test again. If it fails you can leave the CDRW drive on the primary controller card itself. The CDRW drive on my PC is still connected to the original motherboard controller slot. The ATA controller card throughput is more efficient for the 30 GB drive, rather than CDRW drive.

Let's hope you will see some success after these changes.

[Abdullah Abulhasan]

Well, right you were on this, and your previous counts!

1. The (NTFS OS) Win XP did play a part in the boot problem.

2. Although I got better support from the store personnel than from the card vendor's website, revisiting both CompUSA's and Maxtor's support led to a couple more valuable pointers, and validated most of what this forum shows. Resetting the BIOS (clearing ESCD) was a useful new troubleshooting step.

3. Your previous suggested were an exact rollback to my prior config, which I followed accordingly.

4. I also included CHnuschti's procedure of attempting this with a blanked "new" HDD.

I realized I had been looking at success all along, when again, the BIOS chose my 30GB ATA-133 drive, on the new controller, to host F10 Setup.

Reinstalling the OS (Win 2K this time, no more XP!) was a seamless transition to the best performance I have seen yet with my recent upgrades:

-300 Mhz Intel Pentium II
-Nvidia GeForce 440SE VGA
-ITE IT8212 GigaRaidRaid Express HDD Controller
-PC 100 RAM up to 224MB

all of which I recommend for anyone who wants to extend the usable life of a DP4000 6266MMX, and who won't be phased by the 'Compaq adventure' of it. Thanks again to all!