BH6 --> BE6 V2 Upgrade, major problem

[DavidCane]

I've just bought an ABIT BE6-II V2.0 RAID to replace my aging BH6 V1.0

My system had 2 Hard Drives, 1 is ATA/66 and the other is ATA/33. The ATA/66 is partitioned 50:50 with Win ME on 1 and Win 2K on the other. The ATA/33 drive is just used as storage. Hence the main reason for the upgrade, I want to be able to use the ATA/66 drive at that speed.

So now for the problem. I fitted the BE6 motherboard only to find that it wouldn't recognise my drives. I tried many configurations, such as on drive on the ATA/66 ports and the other on IDE1, but no joy.

The best I could get was for the drives to be recognised, WinME starting to boot, but about 2 seconds after the splash screen appears, the PC either shuts down or hangs. When it tries to reboot in Safe mode the same happens.

Is there a way around this that doesn't involve a re-format? I really don't want to have to do that.


Thanks for your help

David Cane

[justy]

Ensure that the drive parameters are the same in the new motherboard, as they were in the old motherboard. i.e. cyls,heads,secs.

Hope this helps a little.

All the best, Justy.

[daverme]

I second justy's comment; the BIOS in some mobo's is NOT set to auto detect by default so that's what I would do first, set up the BIOS to auto-detect hard drives.

Beyond that, however, getting Windows to reconfigure itself to adapt to a new mobo, without a reformat/reinstall, requires jumping through some hoops, at best. Some have gotten it to work while others, such as myself, have never been able to do it (well, maybe once). There are other threads on SysOpt that give advice on how to do this. Before doing ANYTHING ELSE, check them out.

Dave

[DavidCane]

Well the good news it that it works now. The Sound Card was conflicting with the UDMA 66 Controller because is was in PCI slot 5. So I moved it to slot 4 and it works.

Now I'm just not sure whether I've got the ATA66 drive actually running at 66.6 MB/sec becasue I've got an ATA33 drive as a slave on the same cable (it wouldn't boot otherwise).

Any tips to check this?

Cheers

[DavidCane]

Well, in the few hours since my last post, I've completely reformatted the computer after a couple of dramas with Win 2k.

Now I have it all running perfect, simply because I have done a complete clean installation.

Oh well, looks like it couldn't be avoided

[scotter]

well here is the deal with the BE6-2 you have to read page 1-4 of the manual very carfully as to what slots are shared with what. It's a night mare http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/frown.gif
slot 5 shares HPT 366 bus master controler
slot 3 shares IRQ with HPT 366
slot 5 and 2 share IRQ

So you really only end up with 3 pci slots
1 and 4 are completely free and 2 is fine if you dont put anything in 5

I just did a upgrade of a system to one of these it took a while to get every thing to work right but I finaly did it
primary IDE on HPT 03
CD-rw on primary IDE 01
CD and ZIP on IDE 01