Simviation Forums

My "C" drive fried a few days ago...and I had to reinstall OS...

but for some reason...my computer won't pick up my PCI IDE thing...

any ideas?

Jeff

is there anything in the boot-up bios thingy that could suggest it isnt active?

By PCI IDE 'thing', you mean your RAID controller right?

Well, that thing should have came with a disk. Simply press f6 during the windows XP setup when it asks if you have any third party RAID/SCSI drivers to install.

Ultra ATA controller...

...and its not booting up in bios...and I don't know how to activate it...

external (PCI card) or built-in ide controller?

If it works like mine does, it will scan all IDE ports (sata and pata) just after the memory test. just be sure that your monitor is warmed up, and check if all stuff is there (should be 2x normal IDE and 2x SATA, or 2x normal IDE and a second screen for the SATA if it's a RAID)

PCI IDE will come after onboard stuff has initialized (but will try to be the first to boot from as is the case with my vintage Promise ATA-66 controller)

It's a specific chipset driver for your mainboard. It comes with the mobo in the box it came in or is included in the restore disk on prebuilts.

The driver can also be found, with the rest of the mainboard's drivers, at the manufacturers website.

The mainboard drivers should be obtained and readied for use prior to windows installation, so they can be installed at first boot into windows.

Typically, the drivers for the mainboard are IDE, memory controller drivers, onboard sound and video, LAN and AGP or GART drivers.

I suspect that many people have bad graphics due to incorrect or missing GART or AGP drivers.

Windows loads a generic driver for all these devices (except sound) but they are not optimised until the correct and specific chipset drivers are installed.

It's all about understanding chipsets. Chipsets provide features. Features are hardware based, and they need drivers.

Chipset drivers should be the next thought after you say the word "format", because that's what you need as soon as you boot into windows for the first time.