Maxtor controller card

[mikeL]

Hello to all, and I need some help.

My setup:
W2K pro / SuSE 8.0
WD 120GB harddrive
SE440BX (Dell) mother board
Maxtor ATA/133 PCI adapter card
384MB memory

My situation: The system boots and runs great, however I have found three glitches, I cannot boot into Recovery Console because W2K cannot find my hard drive. The next is that I'am unable to format any free space on the hard drive using either W2K's Disk Management, or Partition Magic. In order to format my free space I had to connect the hard drve to IDE 1 setup my new partition then connect to the controller card. I guess what I would like to know is this a common problem with controller cards?

Thanks for taking time to read this
Mike.

[nukes]

Does your card require you to press a certain key at startup for win2k, for example, I have to press F1.

[Ultima]

If yer booting from win2k cd, you'll prolly have to load the drivers for yer card 1st in order to see the drive

I had to do this too with my server in order for it to see the drives on my ata100 onboard controller.

Get the drivers, put em on floppy, and press F6 when ya boot up from win2k cd.

[mikeL]

nukes, do you mean in order to boot into W2K? No. it just goes through LILO and then W2K's boot loader.

[mikeL]

ultima, The drivers are installed and the system boot up just fine, the problems are that I cannot get into Recovery Console, or create any partitions unless I reconnect the drive to IDE 1.

[Scott Tiger]

I've posted Dirx on how to install a Promise card in XP.. The method should be the same in W2k. My posts are towards the bottom of the thread.

Let me know if you have any questions or if what I've posted isn't an appropriate solution for your problem.

Regards.

EDIT: Forgot to post the link:

http://www.techimo.com/forum/t42528.html

[Scott Tiger]

Okay.. I might have read your post wrong. Does the computer boot up into Normal mode okay? If it's not working in the Recovery Console it could be that the drvier for the card isn't loading since you're basically booting into safe mode. Sounds wierd but that might be your problem. Let us know which is the case.

[mikeL]

Scott, The computer boots into windows and linux without any problems, it's just that I cannot restart the computer and get into the Recovery Console, and I am unable to create a logical partition using windows disk management, or partition magic. I would like to know if this is a common problem with a controller card. Because I connected the drive to my IDE 1 channel and created the logical partition, then had to reconnect the drive to my controller card. This seems pretty ridiculous just to create a partition or get into the recovery console.

[Scott Tiger]

Well, I know very little about how Windows works at the lower levels but if you can get the card to work with Windows fine when booting into normal mode but can't get it to work when booting into the RC then I'd say Windows probably is booting at a very minimal state and is not loading the drivers for your card. I don't know if there's a way to manually call the driver to load in Windows the same way you can in Linux but I doubt it.

That's the only explaination I can come up with. Maybe someone else will come along that knows more than I.