On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 20:18:22 -0500, Michael L. Coleman
wrote:

Need Hardware Wizard

I am not a hardware guru, but have built a few PC's. I have a Dell
Dimension 8100 with onboard controller, one 40 GB HDD, CD-ROM, DVD
burner and IOMEGA ZIP drive (total of four devices the max for my
onboard controller). I wanted to add a second fast hard drive for DVD
burning (very disappointed in DVD burning speed, but that's another
story). I bought a MAXTOR 40 GB drive and a SIIG ATA 133 PCI
controller card. I put the card in and installed the driver for it.
It shows up in the Device Manager as a SCSI controller. I connected
the new MAXTOR drive to the ATA 133 card by itself, but cannot get the
PC to see the new drive. I have tried different slots, tried running
the new drive as master, slave, cable select....no good. The SIIG
card has several jumpers (1) one that changes the card from PCI to
RAID.....tried both. Also jumper for primary and secondary channel.
Not sure what they are for, but they came without jumpers installed.
I have scoured the USENET and found that most people recommend fooling
the PC by making the bios boot from SCSI. I cannot find that option
on my PC. One option I am considering is canning the IOMEGA ZIP, and
adding the new MAXTOR to the onboard controller. Am I giving up too
easy? Any advice is welcome.


Mike Coleman

I have one of those SIIG ATA133 PCI controller cards, found nothing
particularly unusual about it's use. You are aware that one of the
pin headers is just the output for the LED, that it should NEVER have
a jumper on them? The first jumper on mine is for RAID support, but
mine isn't a changable jumper, is hard-wired "on". The second jumper
location on mine doesn't have the pins installed, so is permanently
"off", the function is "Base Address 5 Enable". I'm unsure exactly
what it is, but a SIIG document I read mentioned that it should never
be needed (whatever that means, I know mine works fine without it).

Your system is P4 based, right? It has to have a minimum of ATA100 on
the onboard IDE controller, which will yield higher performance that
this SIIG add-on card. Even though the add-on card is ATA133, it's
running over the PCI bus, so it's always going to be slower than the
integrated southbridge IDE controller. If I were you I would jumper
the SIIG card for non-RAID mode and hook the IOMEGA ZIP and CDROM
drives up to it. If you jumper the card for RAID you may need then
enter the configuration screen (which may be a simple text-based setup
opposed to the fancy menu on cards like Promise) and configure the
drive as a single stripe or span (whichever, preferribly a span, will
allow it to be moved/removed from the SIIG card at a later date and
used normally), but again you dont' need to set the card as a RAID
card at all, so it may be better not to.

Perhaps it's a silly question, but did you partition and format your
new hard drive?

There is likely a setting in your BIOS to allow booting from the SIIG
card, but perhaps it's awkwardly or generically worded so it's
difficult to identify. However, you definitely do not need to boot
the new HDD from the SIIG IDE add-on card for Windows to see it.


Dave