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  • #2294643

    ATA133 on an ATA100 Board

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    by webmaster ·

    Is it possible to use an ATA133 HDD on an ATA100 Motherboard? we just bought 4 ATA133 HDD’s and the dell machine we are trying to install it to dosent recognise the drive, was just wondering if ATA 133 and 100 are incompatable with each other down the way.

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    • #2732719

      What kind of error?

      by gralfus ·

      In reply to ATA133 on an ATA100 Board

      Does the drive not appear in BIOS at all? Typical things to check would be the jumpers (single drive, master/slave, cable select), cable orientation, try another data cable, and try a different power cable.

      Some larger drives require a newer BIOS to recognize the whole drive. Some new drives even come with IDE controller cards to get around the issue. But I don’t think there is any incompatibility with using a 133 on a 100 board.

    • #2732709

      Ideas

      by thechas ·

      In reply to ATA133 on an ATA100 Board

      First, Technical Questions belong in the Technical Q&A section, not the Discussion Forum.

      The ATA 133 drives should be backward compatible.

      If your motherboard has an ATA100 IDE controller, I assume that unless the new drives are huge, that the controller can deal with the drive.

      Are you installing the new drive as a Slave, or as a new drive on the PC?

      If a new drive, I am at a loss.

      If a slave drive, I have a few ideas:

      Check jumpers on BOTH drives.
      Many hard drives have different jumper settings for Master with slave present.

      Check your IDE cable. Is it a cable select style?
      If so, both drives need to be set to cable select, and the Master and Slave connectors must go to the correct drives.

      Some brands of drives do not “play” well together.
      I try to only use drives from the same manufacture on the same IDE cable.

      Remember, that Windows will not recognize the new drive and assign a drive letter until the drive is partitioned.
      If you are adding the new drive as a slave drive to increase data storage, you might want to set up the drive with just an extended DOS partition.
      This helps with drive letter assignments if your boot drive is set up with logical drives.

      If you are running Windows 9X, Me, W2K prior to SP3, or XP without SP1, you are limited to drives no larger than 137GB.
      The version of fdisk on a W98 startup disk cannot properly setup drives over 120GB.
      You can download an update from Microsoft.

      If you still have problems, please post in the Technical Q&A with more details:
      Drive size and brands / models.
      Drive configuration, Master, Slave, single
      Version of Windows.
      Any other pertinent data.

      Chas

      • #2732661

        sorry

        by webmaster ·

        In reply to Ideas

        Hi,

        Sorry wasnt ment to be a tech help request just was wondering about backwards incompatability with ata as i tryed all you suggested before i posted.

        thanks for the help.

    • #2732479

      Backward compatibility!

      by addison ·

      In reply to ATA133 on an ATA100 Board

      Being that the MBD has to recognize the HDD it would have to be ATA133 or higher. However,if the MBD was ATA133 and the HDD was ATA100 all would be well, being that technology is backward compatible, and not forward! I hope this answers your question!

      • #2727095

        HD strange NOISE

        by cesarforever ·

        In reply to Backward compatibility!

        I?ve been experiencing strange noise in new HD MAXTOR 6Y080L0 that I bought. My mother board is ASUS A7S333.
        When I turn on the computer, turn off or copy some file the HD makes strange noise, just like old 500MB HDs… there is no way to be mother board incompatibility, is there?

    • #2733657
      Avatar photo

      The simple answer is yes they should work

      by hal 9000 ·

      In reply to ATA133 on an ATA100 Board

      But with a lot of the new IDE HDD’s some of them just don’t want to play nice together. So just put one in on the primary IDE lead as the master and try to see if BIOS sees it. You may have to go into the BIOS and not rely on the “Auto Detect” option. Now if it isn’t seen in the BIOS all by itself they you’ll have to flash the BIOS to a newer version and hopefully it should be seen and recognized for exactly what it is.

      Unless you are attempting to use some really huge HDD’s they should work but may require a lot of mucking around with different IDE leads and jumper settings till you get them to work. With the new Seagate’s you will have to set both of them on the same IDE channel to Cable Select and use an IDE lead that is the cable select variety as they only have the master and cable select option available so you can not just make them what you want them to be. But you should try only one at a time until you get it either recognized or prove that the M’Board will not support the drive.

      With 4 HDD’s it is unlikely that they are all faulty but just to be on the safe side you should try them in other computer/s just to make sure that they do actually work as it is not unknown for a box of these things to be dropped and ruined either but even then the BIOS should still recognize them but they just shouldn’t run or be partition able.

      Now this is really a Q & A question and you should post it there with a lot more information like the make and size of the drives in question and at the very least the model of the Dell and if available the make and model of the M’Board.

      While these things should work it is always possible that the M’Board is something that will only accept Dell parts it is one of the problems of buying brand name computers you are generally locked into buying any required spares from these same people as they have their own BIOS written for some of these M’Boards that will only work with parts that they have specified in the BIOS.

      Col

    • #2732140

      Depends sometimes but should work

      by deadly ernest ·

      In reply to ATA133 on an ATA100 Board

      The drives should work on an older board, but not at ATA 133 naturally. However, sometimes the new HDD is just too big for board and thinking it is faulty and wont recognise it; a BIOS upgrade will often fix this. Another point to look at for is the cable that you are using, I have found with some older gear you have to go back to the older cables.

      I have a number of modern HDD that I swap in and out of older machines, usually for test and rebuild purposes, and that includes using a 40GB HDD in a Pentium 100, a Celeron 233, and a Cyrix 333, haven’t yet tried the 40GB in the 486 though.

      • #2690519
        Avatar photo

        I think you would be wasting your time

        by hal 9000 ·

        In reply to Depends sometimes but should work

        On the 486 if I remember correctly there was a Promise Technology VESA IO card that was available that could recognize the large HDD of the day up to something around 4 GIG.

        What you have to remember is that most of those old 486 M’Boards didn’t have inbuilt IDE controllers so you had to rely on an add on card to do the job. From memory I think I used the Promise Technology IO cards because they could recognize the biggest HDD that where then available but even what was considered as huge in those days just wouldn’t rate a mention now days.

        Actually I can remember a 486 that I bought and I had to fight with the sales man for a 500 MEG HDD as I was told that it would be impossible to ever use anything like the max capacity of that HDD. They wanted me to buy a 100 MEG drive as that was most likely what they had plenty of in stock and the 500 MEG was a special order. But a few years latter at one of my clients I ran across a problem with a 486 that needed a new HDD and it just wouldn’t accept the smallest drive then available well it could be forced to read the drive but it was impossible to format the drive and also impossible to load the drive as well from memory. I think I tried using Disk Clone to make a clone of the HDD onto the new one but it just wouldn’t boot when the new drive was used as the boot drive. Anyway to cut a long story short I had to find a new 500 MEG drive that would suit that particular machine which from memory was running 95 and it was defiantly on a peer to peer network. I think it was the last of their original computers left that had not been replaced and was only put back into service when a new person started there until it could be replaced with a new one. I just remember a major problem with it in getting it running for the few weeks that it was used until it was replaced I think it was a bit of a two way street as they didn’t want to buy a new computer if the person didn’t work out so it was left in service for enough time to make sure that the person in question would stay there.

        Col

        • #2691323

          ATA 100 usually Pentium – use scsi

          by deadly ernest ·

          In reply to I think you would be wasting your time

          Most 486 boards are ATA 33 or ATA66 and most ATA 100 are pentium boards, so I have not had m uch trouble there. NB Some late 486 boards were pentium style with a 486 chip and thus had ATA100.

          With HDDs for older boards and no HDD small enough is a problem solved by using SCSI drives with a SCSI controller. The SCSI controller does not care how big and you can partition to suit the MB BIOS limitations.

        • #2691260
          Avatar photo

          That would certainly work

          by hal 9000 ·

          In reply to ATA 100 usually Pentium – use scsi

          But I don’t think I could have sold the price of using a SCSI controller/drive on that particular computer.

          But right at the moment I’m a bit peeved with SCSI as I’ve just had 2 of them fail in my workstation. I experienced problems like slow booting and then just not booting and of course every drive passed testing showing that they where working perfectly. So partway through a reload I discovered the real problem but by then the boot drive had been wiped and part way reinstalled now I’m just waiting for my 2 new drives to arrive and then throw Windows into a fit I suppose but then every workstation uses 19 HDD don’t they?

          Col

        • #2691947

          Most are lucky to have 3

          by deadly ernest ·

          In reply to That would certainly work

          Yeah the scsi option acn be costly if all new gear but some used gear is available and works OK.

          19 HDDs I would have a hernia trying to keep straight what was what, having my 2 HDDs in 5 x 40GB is enough trouble for me.

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