Promise Ultra100TX Card & IBM Aptiva

Hello,

I recently got an IBM 40GB hard drive with a Promise Ultra100Tx ATA100 Card. I meant to place these two items into my IBM Aptiva 2162 S3C to replace the 4 Gig hard drive(running out of space). Since I only have one hard drive bay (Do not plan to use the bay close to the processor heatsink), I was planning to use the 40GB as the main bootable drive.

Unfortunately, when it boots up by itself without the old hard drive on the motherboard controller, the Ultra ATA100 card will say detecting....detect the new Hard drive correctly...and then freeze before it starts booting..either to hard drive or windows boot disk. The screen is completely black and the only way to recover is to turn the machine off ...restart...only to get the same thing again.

Before I bought the controller card, the tech from that company asked me to check for PCI bus mastering version is 2.1 or better. I used HWinfo to try to find it and it said "PCI (2.1)" or something to that effect. Is this the same thing?? Also I tried the card and new hard drive on my friend's Celeron 433 machine and it worked fine.

A friend suggested that the IBM Aptiva bios may be conflicting with the bios on the Ultra ATA100 card. If this is the case, is there a workaround? I already flashed my bios to the latest IBM offered(12/1998) to no avail.

Are there any other things I should look out for?

The Promise website and IBM websites were not helpful to say the least...

There have been some issues with BIOS revisions and the promise cards. This could very well be the problem. You may try removing the Promise card and plug the HDD directly to your IDE Channel 1 on the mainboard. You'll most likely need the drive overlay (EZ drive, etc).

Will the system boot to a floppy without the drive attached and the Promise card in?
If so, have you tried flashing the Promise card's BIOS?

Just acouple ideas.