any suggestions on adding a eide card to a older pentium?

[danbpc]

I have a pentium 133 with pci and vx chip set
amibios circa july 1995.

I want to add a new 30mb maxtor hard drive to it and naturally it is unhappy. System hangs on boot. I checked Maxtor web site and they suggest a new ata/eide card with its own bios.

Is this a sure thing, most likely will work or waste of time and money on this box?

 

[osuman]

It should be possible to get it working without the card. Where does it hang on the boot process?

 

[Guest_imported]

You could try a Promise Ultra100 PCI card - I've found they work for me in a variety of situations.

ROGER - GØAOZ.

 

[ceh4702]

If the Drive is ultra ATA 100 you need a specially sheilded EIDE ribbon to plug it into. I think they use an extra wire for every wire on the ribbon for grounding/shielding. Another problem is the drive may not run at full speed with your current motherboard.

If it is a 30 GB drive (30 MB seems small ... I have more memory than that), your bios may not be able to read a drive that big. A program like EZ-DRIVE may be able to partition it and make it usable.

Seems like a waste of money to spend on a P133. You may be able to purchase a PII/III pretty cheap. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[danbpc]

thank you all for your replies, the bios is not upgradable
and I tried a SIIG ultra ata/100 eide card and it was recognized by the system, but the system just hung when I tried to f-disk the drive, checked the jumpers on the drive and gave up

I went out and bought a new system for 400 bucks

Thanks again for all your suggestions.

 

[JohnS9051]

Sorry I didn't respond soon enough to help danbpc.

But if anyone else has a similar problem, here is a site with BIOS upgrade cards that support large hard drives:

http://store.firmware.com/cgi-bin/mfi/index.html

Hope this helps. Good luck.

John