I recently purchased a Promise Ultra100 TX2 hard drive controller card and installed it in an Antec MB-5981 Super 7 motherboard supporting UDMA/33. I bought a new 40-pin 80 connector cable ($9.95 at Electronics Discount) and used it to attach an IBM Deskstar to the Promise card. I was careful (with the PC powered off and not plugged in) to attach the cable's black cable connector (marked
ATA100/133 PRIMARY) to the HD, and the blue connector (marked ATA100/133 SYSTEM BOARD) the the HD1 connector on the card.
On bootup I got the message: Primary Master hard disk fail. This was a working hard drive up until this moment.
It wasn't ATA100 or ATA66, just an older Deskstar I had on hand. I just wanted to see if the hookup would run the way I'd connected everything.
Then I removed that HD and attached a second working IBM Deskstar ATA100 drive to the the card in the same manner. On bootup I got the same error.
There is only one way you can attach the connectors to the hard drive and the card, so I couldn't have inserted them in backwards. I can't imagine how two hard drives could fail from being connected to a HD controller card. I'd used several Promise EIDE cards years ago in 486 PCs with great success.
I installed each failed drive to another PC, and neither fdisk nor Partition Magic would recognize that a hard drive was present - so they do seem ruined by being hooked up with the controller card and cable.
Can anyone shed any light on this? I really wanted to speed up two Super 7 PCs I have using ATA66 or ATA100 hard drives with Promise Ultra66 or Ultra100 controller cards.
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