Recently at work, we added a couple of SATA drives to a rather
heavily loaded PC, which already had a Maxtor/Promise Tx2
ATA controller card installed to add some additional disks
in removeable caddies. The motherboard is an ASUS P4G8X,
with a P4/Xeon chip installed. The motherboard has been
very reliable, however, as you'll read below, is becoming
rather dated.
Using the builtin motherboard SATA support, we plugged
in a 400G Seagate SATA drive. The BIOS recognized the
IDE disks, the Maxtor card recognized the drives plugged
into it connector, and the SATA BIOS recognized the SATA
drive plugged into its connector (all determined by
watching the screen as the system booted up). But after
the screen where the BIOS prints out PCI IRQ assignments,
the screen went blank, and Windows didn't boot. By process
of induction, deduction, and intuition we've determined
that the Maxtor Tx2 and SATA controller can't coexist,
at least during the boot phase. We think this is because
their respective BIOS overlays end up in the same memory
location. Neither the motherboard BIOS nor the Maxtor Tx2
card appear to have a method for changing where their
BIOS's get loaded. Have you seen this sort of thing? Are
there any workarounds?
What we found was that if we turned off the SATA drive during
boot (using the key in the caddy), and then turned it
back on after Windows booted, all is well. We think this
is because Windows doesn't depend upon the SATA and IDE
controller card/chip's BIOS to access the drive.
As if this wasn't enough excitement, we added a new 750G
Seagate drive to the mix. In this case the SATA BIOS
would just hang, even if the Maxtor Tx2 card was removed.
Later we found that some motherboard's (apparently this
Asus is one of them) do not support SATA drives larger
than 500G. [we have the latest BIOS, but it is dated 2003,
I believe]. Again, however, if we turned the drive off
until after Windows booted, then all is well.
What we think might improve the situaion is a PCI-based
SATA controller card that will let us jumper/program
its settings so that it relocates its BIOS overaly in
a location other than where the Maxtor Tx2 card locates
its BIOS. It would be nice if this SATA card let us
step around the motherboard BIOS's 500G limitation,
but if that limitation is in the BIOS proper we're
probably out of luck. Yes, it looking like it is time
to upgrade the motherboard/cpu.
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