Promise Ultra 100 and CDRW Drives

[Dave2]

I'm thinking about purchasing a Promise Ultra 100 controller card to get a little more speed out of my Maxtor 27.2GB ATA66 hard drive. I right now have an Acer 4x4x32 IDE CDRW and was wondering if it will work fine on that card.

[Jonty]

I see no reason that your Acer CDRW won't run OK on the Promise card.

I have one of these Promise Ultra 100 cards in my computer right now. I bought it a few weeks ago as I had bought an additional hard drive and had nowhere to plug it in! The drive I have plugged into it is a Quantum lct08 Ultra66 26GB and this works brilliantly with it. My C: drive is a slower Ultra33 and this is plugged into the primary slot on the motherboard. I am considering making the faster drive the boot drive but need to get some software to do this properly.

You can plug in four IDE, EIDE, Fast-ATA and Ultra-ATA devices and these can be mixed as there are independent programmable timing registers in the controller's design so there won't be performance degradation. You don't have to worry about anything as its all set automatically.

Installing and setting up the card is simplicity itself, so, go out and get one!

[Dave2]

At Promise's web site it says that CD-ROM drives can't be detected in DOS because the card doesn't use standard resources. I had that problem with the BX Master motherboard with the onboard Promise Ultra 66 controller connected to my CDRW. That would mean that I can't format my hard drive and reinstall Windows 98 when the CDRW drive is connected to the Promise Ultra 100. Is it possible to make DOS see the CDRW before installing Windows 98 without disconnecting the CDRW from the card and connecting it to the motherboard?