ABIT BE6 and IBM 75 GXP hard drive

[Robert J. Chewey]

Anyone running an ABIT BE6 mother board with the IBM 75 GXP hard drive from
the built-in High Point ATA/66 controller?

I have updated to the latest BIOS and have tried Win 98SE with the latest HP
ATA/66 drivers and Win ME which has its own drivers.

Anyway, the problem is the computer keeps freezing up. I have taken out all
PCI cards and installed a new/clean version of both OS's, still no luck.
Everything installs fine but after a little while in Win it locks up.

Thanks for any help you can give.

[bobajob]

Try this site, http://members.nbci.com/_XMCM/abit_be6/index.html
it solved all my BE6 probs.
Good luck,
Bob

[bobajob]

Sorry just had another thought, try disabling com ports 1 and 2 in your bios, this solved my Hpt 366 lock-ups.

[Onslaught]

I had the same problem. What you need to do is go to IBM's Website and Download-ATA Switching Utility-Since the BE6 doesn't support ata 100 you need to boot using the switch utility floppy(you'll make that) and which your drive to I believe 4 which is = ata66, 5= ata 100..

Good luck

[This message has been edited by Onslaught (edited 01-04-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Onslaught (edited 01-04-2001).]

[Robert J. Chewey]

Thanks to everyone for your help.

Here is what 'kind of' fixed the problem.

IBM has a utility 'IBMATASW' that allows you to force the drive to run at Ultra ATA/33, ATA/66, and ATA/100 support (UDMA modes 2, 4 and 5).

I download that and ran it and started with UDMA 5 (ATA/100) kind of knowing it would not work as the HPT 366 controller does not support that. It locked up my machine in WinME while doing a disk defrag. Nothing new there. I then moved the drive to UDMA 4 (ATA/66). I was hoping this was going to solve all of my problems. Well it didn't. Still locked up doing a defrag. By the way it would have locked up eventually, it is just that the defrag puts a lot of stress on the drive and that's what locks it up. So the last choice is UDMA2 (ATA/33). Just to remind you that everything worked find when I ran the drive off of the EIDE1 ATA/33 on-board controller. Well that did the trick. It even showed up in the HPT screen as being a UDMA 2 vs. UDMA 4 like it had said all the times before. It wasn't an IRQ conflict after all. So I wanted to know if I was gaining anything by leaving it on the HPT 366 controller vs. the EIDE controller.

I ran SiSoft 2001 and these were the results with the drive on the HPT 366 with the drive locked at UDMA 2:
IBM 75GXP - 20255
EIDE UDMA66 - 13000
EIDE UDMA33 - 8000
EIDE UDMA - 6500
EIDE 4GB - 3500

Looks good, but does anyone have benchmarks of the IBM 75GXP on a true ATA/66 controller?
Oh by the way SiSoft also said the HPT's latency was set to high and it could be hogging the PCI bus. Not 100% sure what or how I can lower it?

I will move the drive to the EIDE 33/ATA on-board and do the benchmarks again to compare them to the HPT 366. I didn't get time last night as I was so happy it was working. Plus after being out of the water for 4 days I needed to get the data migrated from the old drive and get some work done.

Thanks again everyone for your time and input.

I will post the benchmark numbers for the ATA/33 controller soon.

[Andy_L]

If it helps, , i got 23337 on a a7v/ 46 gb 75 gpx with the promise ATA 100 onboard controller.