The Cards Have Arrived - And The Fun Begins

The video and IDE cards arrived today. Naturally, I decided to install them both.

The video card went in easily. I actually read the instructions before beginning the job. I installed the card, ran the install program, and configured the resolution. It works just fine. Tomorrow, my son will try to install his game (Age of Mythology) to see if it will run. The old ATI card didn't have enough memory for the game to operate, but this 128 MB card has much more than the 16 MB required.

The IDE card is new territory for me. The Compaq Presario motherboard only supports Ultra33 speeds, while the card will work with drives that talk Ultra133 - as does my new 250 GB drive. I still want to boot from the 7 GB drive and use the big drive for data only.

Once again, I read the instructions, and installed the drive and card. I left the drive jumpered as cable select. When I started the machine, the new card's BIOS came up, and it detected the drive with 232 GB capacity. Sounds good so far. Then, the message 'IDE Bus Master Enabled' came up, and everything stopped. I waited for a while. The Compaq boot screen never appeared.

After nothing happened, I powered down, unplugged the power on the new drive, and restarted. It came up on the existing drive as normal. The instructions suggested that I load the driver in Win2K if I wanted to boot from the existing drive, but I think it refers to when the boot drive is moved to the new controller. (I can't do that because the cables won't reach around the power supply, which is found in the middle of the case.) I installed the driver, shut down, reconnected the power connector to the new drive, and restarted. It hung again in the same spot.

I'm done for tonight, but I will try a couple of things tomorrow:

• Leave the power connected on the new drive, but disconnect the IDE cable. Will had mentioned that maybe the power supply wasn't sufficient to handle the extra drive. If it boots with the drive connected to the power supply, that probably isn't the case.
• See if I can boot from the CD-ROM (using the Mandrake CD) or a floppy. Is this a hard drive issue, or is it just hanging on the new drive? (I don't think this will do much, since I never even see the Compaq boot page.)
• Try the same thing in the previous step with the old drive disconnected. (Not sure what this will show, but it covers the bases.)

We'll see what happens.