Uncreative Labs

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

years ago with wfwg I had 4-630m ide and a cd on the pnp sb16 isa card. the sb16 with ide interface required a driver before i coud see the cd drive

now i have a w98 system and would like 4 hd and a cd on my crystal 1868b isa pnp sound card
I am not even 100% sure the interface is ide., but it likely is.

I don't think I want to use a dos level driver and the boot floppy does not see the cd drive.
can this be done and how?

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

The cd's that hook into the Soundblaster's port are usually not IDE. Easiest way to tell is to look at the drive and see if there is a Master/Slave jumper on it or if it has numbers.

Mitsumi rings a bell, you would probably need a dos driver specific to the drive my guess. If it really is a 3rd IDE port I couldn't comment on how to get it going, it would need to be set to the IDE alternate address which If I remember correctly was not always possible depending on the card and the system.

Anyway having a dos level driver for a proprietary CD under windows 9x wasn't a big deal, I've done it with no ill effect many times, there doesn't even seem to be a performance penalty (beyond of coarse the speed of the drive inherantly) The problem comes up when you try to do it under Windows NT5 & higher aka 2k. As you need to try to use NT4 or NT3.5 drivers which doesn't usually work.

Good Luck

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

If ya aint sure go to th99. they have all kind of info on ISA cards. If your cards ide then it probly uses the 3rd ide channel known as teritery or something like that. All the sb16, sb32, sb64, ess, yamaha I own use it.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

the card is a crystal 1868b and the port IS ide.
when i turn off the 2nd (secondary) controller on the mb, and a cd is connected to the sound card, it is detected at bootup and files can be copied from it.

However, when I turn the 2mnd ( secondary) ide port on the mb the cd is not seen or detected.

I did a search on th99 and did not come up with an excat match. the only jumpers are near the rear bracket and both layouts refer to the jumpers as "speaker" and " line out" the card are referred to as ESS-1688 ) not the number windows sees.
the card is NOT detected as a PnP device at bootup.

astra, nssi, and aida are inconclusive.
the card does work ok.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

can you set the mb's second cotroller to a different adress?

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

looking at both the sound card - only amp and line-out jumpers.
and the cmos on my system, I see no way to change the addresses of the 2nd hard drive port.
since when the secondary hd port os turned off, the cd connected to the sound card is detected and works properly, I know the port is usable.
approaching from a different angle, I tried to reset IRq's and think since the card now has it's own IRQ
and in device manager has no errors \( worked anyway with the errors)
it's possible, with the right driver file to make it work.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

The alternative IDE address is normally used for QUAD port IDE setups, getting normal ide cards to go into the 3rd or 4th IDE slot is difficult to impossible. You've done it before, I have too but the combination of hardware I used I cannot remember.

My guess is your set of hardware won't work that way, getting more than 4 IDE drives has always been a novelty and is not really standard.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

well i guess you can use a difernt sound card. sb16 are fairly cheap and quite common were I live, heck I have a couple dozen soundblaster in my house. also common were acculogic sIDE/CD they can bet set to the 3rd ide channel.
Good luck

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I've got one word for you (well four actually):

SCSI

Seriously, on older systems IDE bites the big one. With SCSI you can have as many drives as your little heart desires. SCSI controllers typically support 7 or 14 devices, and you can have multiple cards. But really, it would be better to just get a bigger drive. Old adaptec 1542C controllers and 8GB drives are cheap.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

i use pci 2940 scsi cards when i can, i have 1,2,4g scsi drives. also some 1520's an a BIG sb16 card wi th a adaptec 1520 port.
recently I had a lot of trouble. the scsi card was installed in 98se ok bit whern i hooked up a drive,
the system would not go into windows or only safe mode. deleting the device and other stuff, then letting win98 find it again ficed the problem.
later the printer would not work in windows
but when i booted from a floppy , i could sent the
dir to the printer.
deleted ports , let 98 find them again. fixed it.

t6roubles not over see other post/thread.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

got my maxtor ultra ata133 cards
reflashed them to Promise bios and uded promise driver, seems to work well and allows mb controllers to run 4 drives plus added drive on pci controller sees the 5th drive. . scsi controller is still there ( no drive)
and sound card w/ ide port does not seem to interfere