HPT HighPoint Controller Question

I have posted this question to three different forums without one answer so I will try this one. There has to be someone out there who understands the HighPoint Controllers.

HighPoint or Abit hasn't responded to this question which is a simple one for them so it just shows that when you buy something do not expect support from the manufacturer. As a matter of fact I have two Abit BX133 RAID motherboards, a Abit BX6-2 motherboard also, and Abit has never answered a e-mail. I thought HighPoint was more responsible, but they don't answer e-mails either.

So, to the question. I had two hard disks installed on my BX133RAID that were a ATA66 7200 rpm drive and a ATA100 5400 rpm drive. These were just installed with the standard IDE 1 and IDE 2 connectors with the 40 pin ribbon cable. Since I hadn't tried the HighPoint HPT370 onboard controller I thought I would check it out. I set the bios to boot up off of the ATA100 Highpoint controller and connected the hard drives to the IDE 3 and IDE 4 connectors of the HPT370. One hard drive was on the Primary Master, the other on the Secondary Master, with the 80 conductor ribbon cables installed on the drives. OK, I restarted the computer and hit the CTRL H to bring up the HighPoint settings and the drives were correctly recognized and set at UDMA 4 and UDMA 5 which was right. I went to Win98SE and in windows installed the HPT370 drivers and utility, however, the HighPoint controller does not come up on a restart under the SCSI in device manager as it is supposed to. So, windows is not recognizing the HighPoint controller and the utility shows no drives are connected to the Primary and Secondary of the HPT which of course is where I have the drives connected. This leads me to believe you have to have a RAID Array set up which is a problem since you lose all the data on the hard drives and I would have to re-install the software. I am aware of the advantages of RAID but confused as to why the HighPoint Controller isn't recognized in Win98 when the hard drives are installed on the HPT connectors ?? I ran some performance tests and the drives definitely are a subpar data rate and not running at the ATA66 and ATA100 as are shown they are in the motherboard bios.

Any help appreciated on this. I am sure many people don't particularly want a RAID setup but want the ATA rate the drive is rated at. The standard IDE connectors on the motherboard are for ATA33 only so the performance of these drives isn't being met at all.

Dennis

Just a post in case anyone was following this thread. The HPT370 controller is working just fine. I was the problem in the equation. You just don't see as well in your mid fifties as when you were younger. On close inspection I noticed that I had placed one of the 80 pin ribbon cables marked with blue to the hard drive instead of the controller. After I switched everything came up fine under SCSI in device manager and benchmarks accordingly to the new xfer rates. Makes quite a difference.

[wizbones]

Dennis,

Thanks for the in depth post. One of the better questions I've seen asked in a long time. I think if you frequent this board you'll find many answers to many questions.

I love the fact you answered your own questions and did post the answer. Don't sweet it. Everyone makes simple whoops mistakes now and then. More often than not actually.

It's the little things that muck things up. Sometimes just taking the time to post a question and regroup is all we need to see the little thing that's preventing things from moving in a forward direction. A cable in the wrong spot, backwards, not plugged in at all, we've all done it a time or two if not more.

Thanks again for posting and hope to see many more!!

Wizbones

Well in my case it was really embarrasing since I am an engineer and have built all my computer systems for many years. My databases and need for hard drives don't really require the ATA/66/100/133, but I was curious since I had the boards with the HPT370 I figured I would try it out since most all new hard drives are usually at least the ATA66 anymore.  I am not really a computer engineer, but a electronics engineer. You wouldn't think I could make such a mistake but I felt others certainly could learn from it if they made the same mistake I did.

I think if it wouldn't have recognized the drives correctly and configured them in the bios on bootup as UDMA 4 and UDMA 5 drives I probably would have found the problem right away. I didn't really get into looking at the 80 pin designation to see if there really was a difference in the throughput connection.

Forums are important, very important. You learn something new everyday. You also can pick out those who really don't know what they are talking about fairly easily. I haven't time to really browse the forum well but will get to it in the next week or so. So far it looks very nicely laid out.

Dennis

[wizbones]

Dennis,

Never put yourself down for the simple mistakes no matter what your profession or how long you've been doing it.

I've been in Technical Support going on 7 years now and I've taken calls from guys in the IT field for over 30 yrs. We all make mistakes and sometimes need to take a step back, regroup and head back at it.

I totally agree with learning something new everyday, if you don't it's because you aren't breathing.

Keeping it simple is always best. Is it plugged in, is it turned on, are all the cables connected and so on. It's a pleasure reading your post and looking forward to future endeavors.

Have a great weekend!

Hi Dennis and welcome,
I also followed this thread with interest although I didn't have a responce. But it is certainly refreshing to see you come back and post the answer to the problem. Guess everyone has had some problem with those cables, I flipped one several yr's ago and didn't realize it till I purchased a new one thinking it was bad, the little instruction sheet with the new one wised me up.

Posting the solution was a good thing to aid others, and when you get around to looking over this forum, you will see that some never come back to post at all on their question although they may have gotten several responces.
A continued dialog on the problem till solved is very important to the process of it's being solved and helps everyone. Repition never hurt anyone either.
It is good to see you here on this forum.

I think we have all done this in some way. It can be very frustrating.

Thanks to all of you for the soothing words that we all make mistakes, no matter what are profession we are in.

I do hope others who read this thread remember it is to everyone's advantage to post the way the problem was resolved or to keep working to get it resolved. - - They don't use the term "computer friendly" any more as it was about as big a joke as you could get. I don' think I ever installed a program yet that didn't have problems in one form or another. I usually find the mistake myself and well over 90% of the time it lies in the software or hardware developer. I once spent more for phone calls to MSoft than I actually spent on the program and they never could resolve the issue but I finally found it. It was a $35 phone call everytime I rang them up minimum. So, the bottom line is it pays to listen to forums and watch what is going on because more than likely a phone call to the manufacturer or software developer isn't going to get you far and don't expect any quick answers either. No one has the time to wait months for a response.

I see many members here post their systems, although I have built many and for other people, I continue to hang on to four here in the house that are my favorites and have a special place in my experience of good solid performance motherboards over the last few years. I overclock all my systems and always have. After all, if they are spec'd to run for example in a 122 deg F ambient condition all day in a factory enviroment of course they will handle easily 10-15% or more with adequate cooling forever in your home.

All my computers at home have two cdrom drives in them a high speed and CDRW, a minimum of at least two hard drives, a scanner, networking, modems. etc.

Asus T2P4 233 mmx oc'd to 299 mhz. A good reliable socket seven board, one of the first to have 75 and 83 mhz FSB before Super Socket 7 100 mhz came out. Still a nice system and fully upgradable yet even more with of course a K6-2+ or K6-3 AMD. It is my daughers now and she loves it.

Abit BX6-2 with the good old Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 megs and still runs Quake lll Arena like a charm. I do however, have all NVDIA video boards in all systems. This is used when my son has friends over and they play games computer to computer over the network.

Two Abit BX133 RAID motherboards which I totally love. The 440BX chipset is amazing and a great gaming board. I have a 17 year old son who is constantly gaming. One has a Celeron 900 overclocked to a nice safe 1.1 ghz and the other one a Pentium lll overclocked to about 1 ghz.

I have refrained from building up my AthlonXP for my son until they get the diode protection circuit on motherboards to support the newer temp shutdown of the Athlon newer chips. Athlon chips will burn up in nanoseconds if the fan glitches, the heat sink shifts, whatever. Motherboards have been known to catch on fire. A wonderful cpu, I love it, but will wait until it has full supportive protection of the mb. I've built a number of AMD earlier systems, remembering the DX2 32 bit inside / 16 bit outside buss cpu's that were a novelty at the time.

Most of us have overkill in our motherboards anymore, we just don't need that power. But the advancing technology makes it exciting to have tons of power dirt cheap, it is exciting. I was at a computer show today and saw these older Pentium 200 chips, $5. Can anyone remember how exciting it was to have a 200 meg system. My first was a commodore 80, but as far as a IBM PC, 16 megs was the first.

Well, hope to visit more and maybe be able to help some others out.

Dennis