SIS 620 mobo doesn't like my hard drives

[robertbaker]

I recently purchased this board for use with a Celeron 466 CPU. Everything seems to work just dandy, except it likes to trash my hard drives. I tried a WD 3.1GB, then an older Conner 540MB. I cannot boot from these drives on this machine - the BIOS does correctly identify them (by name) on the POST screen. I can set the BIOS to AUTO or USER for both - still no luck. I reset the BIOS in the setup and via the jumpers - no change. I have also tried running Norton Disk Doctor and Spinrite 5 on them, and the machine freezes. I was able to get the drives to format in another machine just fine, but as soon as I put them in this one, the same thing happens. When I try formatting them on the SIS machine, it reports an incorrect drive size (free space) and gives me an "Unable to write to BOOT" message and freezes the machine. I can get the drives "fixed" by running Norton Disk Doctor a/o Spinrite against the drives on another machine. Anyone have ANY idea on this? Could my BIOS be trashed?

[Peter M]

Now what board do you have there? (SiS 620 is a chipset name, not a mainboard product.)

[robertbaker]

It's a Packard Hell "Skye" motherboard. Actually, I believe the problem is the hard drive controller. I happened to have a Promise Technology EIDEMAX 2 card just laying around, so I put it in. The hard drive works fine now. I still have the CD-ROM drive connected to the HDC and it works fine. Any reason why the CD would work but the HDD won't?