Help needed - Problem with Mr Naturals Bios's with Highpoint Raid v2.31 on TH7-II

Help needed - Problem with Mr Naturals Bios's with Highpoint Raid v2.31 on TH7-II

Hi guys,

Hope someone can help me on this

I've connected 1 DVD-ROM drive to each of the Highpoint connections on my TH7-II board
When using an ABIT BIOS or BETA BIOS which doesn't use the v2.31 bios everything is fine and the drives are detected in windows using the 2.0019 drivers

However if I used any of Mr N's bios's which have v.2.31 if the highpoint bios on them, the drives just aren't detected, i've tried all the drivers and everything
Also occasionally takes over 2 mins for the highpoint bios screen to go away on boot up

Anyone got any ideas please?

Thanks

Keyan

Someone correct me if I'm wrong. But I thought that the HighPoint IDEs were only for Hard Drives, not CD or DVD etc.

surprises me that the drives ever worked on the highpoint.

raid controllers normally can't deal with atapi devices - only ide.

Nope, they worked perfectly with the highpoint that came with Bios 38 from Abit but any of Mr N's bios's and they don't detect drives in windows, tried all drivers and everything

It does work with atapi devices, I had no probs in the past

Thanks

Keyan

Check these two links on the HPT controller:

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/370faq.htm
and
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/370BIOS_RAID.txt

This is what it says in the FAQ page:

Q: What devices, if any, can the HPT370 support that a SCSI adapter cannot?
A: The main advantage of the HPT370 is that it can support more devices then SCSI. Example: CD-RW, DVD-ROM, and LS-120. The HPT370 supports IDE hard disk drives, which is a cost effective alternative to SCSI devices. The performances of modern IDE hard disk drive and SCSI hard disk drive are comparable.

or

Q: What advantages does HPT370 have over similar IDE products on the market?
A: The HPT370 is compatible with virtually all IDE devices while similar IDE products only support hard drives. Also, HPT370 products are commonly priced at a fraction of the cost of other IDE products that have similar performance, allowing for a more cost efficient solution for storage management.

I get from all this that the HPT does not support CD/DVD/LS-120 which are either ATAPI or SCSI. No where I can find that it supports any of them. CD-RW, DVD-ROM, and LS-120 are all examples of SCSI in the above answer taken off the HPT site.

Hmmm, never had any problems running my DVD and Burner from the highpoint controller either. But that was before I rearranged my drives and upgraded to the new BIOS.

What does the Hpt BIOS setting program tell you when you press CTRL-H at the Hpt BIOS screen?

Honestly DVD drives worked perfectly with any Hightpoint BIOS older than 2.30/2.31 and any drivers, but with 2.31 bios drives do not detect, tried different drivers and everything

looks like maybe they disabled support for atapi devices in 2.31 bios?

When entering CTRL + H nothing is detected at all with 2.31 - back to 2.0019 and all hunky dory but with Mr N's bios it upgrades HP chip to 2.31 so in a catch 22 situation

Thanks

Keyan

I was also curious because I had only "heard" that the HighPoint controller was only for harddrives. So I emailed HighPoint directly and this is what they said:

Hello,
The HPT controller only supports hard disk drives.
HighPoint Technologies
At 03:29 PM 5/6/02 -0700, you wrote:
I have an Abit TH7II-RAID.
Can I put CDROM, CDRW, or DVD drives on the HighPoint IDE's?
Thanks, Grant

Which is too bad really. What would it take to make it accept other devices like the CD, DVD, etc.?
===============================

Also I just recently switched to the 7D BIOS which has the latest HPT. I found that it was MUCH slower booting and while running Windows XP than the original HPT that was in BIOS 38. And yes, I was using the latest driver from the HighPoint site 2.31.

I am back to the regular IDE and things are MUCH better. A let down to say the least. I would really like to run the OS off those IDE's, but not until I know that others are not having the same response. It really was slow and bad performance.

I don't know if it was because of the HighPoint BIOS switch( I did the 7D a couple of days ago), but on about my fourth reboot I got a major corrupt file on the C: that was only fixable by doing a complete reinstall yesterday and today. Before that XP was running flawlessly for months. My gut feeling is that the newer HPT BIOS was to blame for this major file corruption while booting.

Hi,

have a look at KT7Faq in the Bios section.

Yes, it is an AMD-Board, but it has the same Highpoint-Controller.

They wrote:

Version 1.11.0402 (2 April 2001)

Removed support for CDROM booting

Fixed some bugs and made more stable

According to the Highpoint Technologies website, BIOS versions 1.11 and higher have support for ATAPI devices removed (ie. CDROM, CDRW, DVD). As they never worked reliably anyway, this is probably just formalising the original situation.

cu

Sam

Why not go with the latest beta BIOS from Abit found in the download file th7h7c01.zip at this URL:

http://fae.abit.com.tw/download/beta/th7-ii/

It has an HPT BIOS version of 2.0.1024, yet as far as I can tell, fixes a lot of the same things the 7D does. Grantman would probably get his higher performance from the RAID back and others would probably still get to hook up their ATAPI devices to it. I believe the corresponding driver would be v2.0 found here:

http://fae.abit.com.tw/eng/download/driver/i_adapter.htm#HR100

It is about halfway down the page under: IDE Adaptors:HotRod100 Pro/HPT37X on-board motherboards

By the way, in the download section of the Highpoint site it says the following:

"The BIOS updates posted on this site are only suitable for use with PCI card Host Adapters, not motherboard/HPT3xx chipset combinations. Please visit the motherboard manufacturer's website for the proper download."

Now this may just be Highpoint covering their butts or it may be another reason to go with the Abit beta BIOS.

For what it's worth.

Peace,
Eggroll

Grantman,

You may want to check this out:

http://fae.abit.com.tw/eng/faq/qa/2001/2001102402.htm

It shows the proper installation procedure for the 2.0.1019 Highpoint driver under Windows XP. If I had to guess, you would probably install 2.31 the same way. It seems to show, though, the driver installation during a new install of XP. If you're not reinstalling XP, then this probably doesn't apply to you.

Peace,
Eggroll

Yes it looks like Highpoint has removed ATAPI device support from the 2.30/2.31 bios
The drives are definately detected in 2.0019 and under so it is the 2.30/2.31 bios and drivers which seem to disable the atapi device support which is really such a silly thing to do because it was so useful to be able to plug the drives in the top bays of a full tower case into the highpoint ports because the cable isn't long enough to reach the main ide ports so the highpoint things were brilliant
seems that i'll have to go back to the abit bios beta unfortunately only goes to 1.7v for the cpu
Could Mr N make a version of this bioses which keeps the Highpoint 2.0019 bios in it so that ppl who want to run atapi off the HP can do so?

Thanks

Keyan

Isn't it possible to flash to Mr. N's BIOS, and then downgrade to the older Hpt BIOS?

It is very simple to replace the HighPoint bios:


1. Go to http://www.biosmods.com/ and download cbrom (version 6.xx).

2. Download whatever highpoint bios you want from their website.

3. Read the instructions or online help for cbrom

4. Mod your mobo bios with HPT bios

5. Flash it!


One very important word of WARNING though:

It might well be that it is not possible to flash back to a previous version of and HPT bios without losing all your data. That would be the case if the HPT bios upgrade makes some irrreversible changes to the RAID configuration. Read the highpoint release notes very carefully...

KRich,

Doesn't MrNatural's 7D BIOS only go to 1.7v max vcore?


Eggroll

arman68 - thanks for those instructions, i'll have to try that

eggroll - yeah mr n's 7d bios does only support upto 1.7 but again comes with new hp bios which blocks out atapi devices

Thanks

Keyan

lol took one look at cbrom and ran! looks very very difficult, think have to go to abit beta bios which has the old hp bios

thanks for your help everyone

Keyan

KRich said:

eggroll - yeah mr n's 7d bios does only support upto 1.7 but again comes with new hp bios which blocks out atapi devices

Click to expand...

Right. That's why I was suggesting going with the Abit beta BIOS. I wish someone would explain to me in tangible terms what the advantage of the 7D BIOS is over the Abit beta BIOS. I can't seem to figure it out from the "Updated Abit BD7-Raid and TH7II-Raid Bios. Get them here!" thread.

Peace,
Eggroll

P.S. By the way, if you want to go higher than 1.7v vcore, there is an easier mod than doing the pin wire wrapping on the cpu.

Thanks Eggroll for the above info.

At this point I am not sure I even want to use the HighPoint IDEs at all until I know for sure they can provide the same performance and the regular IDEs. The performance is much better on the regular IDEs and Intel latest Application Accelerator.

Even when I switched my single drive for the first time from the regular IDEs to the HPT IDE and HPT BIOS 2.0.1024(2.0.1019 driver) in BIOS 38 there was a loss of performance. But with the HPT 2.31 in 7D that loss was major, and I think the cause of my crash.

I was hoping to use the extra IDE for future upgrades, but at this point I am better off using the regular IDEs and having the better performance.

If I don't hear that things are fixed with the HPT BIOS soon, I might consider selling this board while it is still popluar ;-)

I was hoping to add a DVDRW and a DVD player to the regular IDE's and I wanted the ability to put my CDRW on it's own channel for better performance. Again, I really just bought the RAID board for extra IDEs not RAID.

I'll keep my eyes open for a HighPoint fix.

Thanks for your help,
Grant

eggroll - i think the difference is that mr n's has got performance enhancements in it compared the abit version - thats what i think the difference is

grantman - can't say i've noticed any performance difference but then i've not tested the drives off there is any such precise way, just run cd's and what have you but i bought the th7ii raid version also cos i needed extra ide ports - who knows there may be some performance difference
i have noted that the hp drivers are a bit iffy at high fsb's even with pci lock on - tend to get blue screens in xp sometimes or computer just randomly restarts and comes with the highpoint driver that caused instability
again catch 22 cos u either have v2.31 and drivers meaning no atapi support but maybe a more stable driver version or v.200.19 bios and drivers which do allow atapi devices but which are slightly less stable

thanks

keyan