Have Problems - Are my components compatible?

Hi there groupies,

Around four months ago I had my system upgraded by a local shop and it has
not been right since. I keep on meaning to take it back but never get round
to it. So I thought I'd better ask the experts.

Since the upgrade my system takes and age to boot up, then when it does it
takes up to three minutes to find my drives when I look for them using My
Computer. All I get during this time is the torch icon searching from side
to side.

All of my programs work fine. If say I open a file in MS Word it will open
straight the way - but if I try to find and open it using My Computer then
it will take a while to find my drives. Once it has found the drives it
will work fine until the next time I reboot.

I am wondering if my drive is compatible with my motherboard due to some
text I see during the boot up process. The boot up process goes something
like this:

1 - Switch on.
2 - Quickly see the Maxtor logo flash up and then some text saying that the
Primary Drive is my Maxtor HDD.
3 - MBUltra133 (PD20276) (tm) BIOS version 2.20.1020.13 (c) 1999-2001
promise technology.
4 - Detecting /
5 - MBUltra133 (PD20276) is not installed because there are no drives
attached.
6 - Press F4 or CTRL-S to enter raid utility (which I can not do as the
keyboard is not yet activated.
7 - The system will then boot up but take an awfully long time. When it
does finally boot up I experience the problem of my drives taking a few
minutes to be recognised.

My system specification is as follows:
AMD Athlon (tm) XP 2400+
512MB DDR RAM
Maxtor 7200rpm 50gig HDD
Gigabyte K7 Triton 400 series 7VAXP Ultra Motherboard (Promise Raid (0,1)
function + ATA 133 IDE interface).

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Regards

Sonars_UK (a very frustrated novice).

..

Since the upgrade my system takes and age to boot up, then when it does it
takes up to three minutes to find my drives when I look for them using My
Computer. All I get during this time is the torch icon searching from side
to side.

All of my programs work fine. If say I open a file in MS Word it will
open
straight the way - but if I try to find and open it using My Computer then
it will take a while to find my drives. Once it has found the drives it
will work fine until the next time I reboot.

I am wondering if my drive is compatible with my motherboard due to some
text I see during the boot up process. The boot up process goes something
like this:

1 - Switch on.
2 - Quickly see the Maxtor logo flash up and then some text saying that
the
Primary Drive is my Maxtor HDD.
3 - MBUltra133 (PD20276) (tm) BIOS version 2.20.1020.13 (c) 1999-2001
promise technology.
4 - Detecting /
5 - MBUltra133 (PD20276) is not installed because there are no drives
attached.
6 - Press F4 or CTRL-S to enter raid utility (which I can not do as the
keyboard is not yet activated.

Go to the BIOS and disable the RAID. It is trying to detect the raid drives
that you do not have on your computer.

"Sonars UK" wrote in message
...
Hi Ralph,

Thanks for the advice which has signifigantly improved boot up time. I
don't get the 'MBUltra133 (PD20276)' text anymore, which really speeds
things up. Unforunatly I am still getting the problem that my system takes
an age to recognise the drives when using My Computer.

I went into the BIOS and whilst in 'Intergrated Peripherals' I chose to
to
disable 'Onboard H/W ATA/RAID' this also had the effect of greying out the
following options: X RAID controller function, X UR2 Duplex Mode & X Midi
Port IRQ.

There was also an option to chose either RAID or BASE for: RAID select on
board serial ATA chip functions.

So now during boot up imediately after my Maxtor HDD has been detected I
get
the following text:

Sil 3112A STATRaid Controller BIOS Version 4.1.36C
Copyright (c) 1997-2002 Silicon Image, Inc.

Press F4 or CTRL-S to enter RAID utility (this doesn't work as my keyboard
doesn't seem to be activated at this time).

Then I get: Primary & Slave channel not found.

Any other advice you could give me would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Sonars UK

If you disabled all RAID options in BIOS you should not be getting any RAID
messages on your screen, or at least I would think not. Make sure all to do
with RAID has been disabled in your BIOS. http://www.ourstrangeworld.com