Ok, I've read on this board taht some people have had issues with ata100 drivers and installing win2k (inparticular eds). Whats the deal with ata100 drivers and the like? and how is it not possible to just from a bootable cd install 2k?

also, if/when i install win2k on a ata100 drive, what steps do u take? just curious!

Well I couldn't really make out much of what you were saying.. (ata100 drivers?)

If you mean installing to a drive on an ATA100 (or any) PCI IDE Controller (like the Highpoint/promise ones) then it works off a bootable cd, you just have to press f6 at startup and put in drivers for the controller, so win2k setup can use it. Get the drivers from the manufacturers website.

If you mean general ATA100 support, there is a small patch available on MS's website to allow win2k to support it, and its included in Service Pack 2.

Anyway..

It's just with the promise drivers.... if you use promise you will need to make a disk with the drivers on it before you isntall 2k as it will not show up as a standard "bootable" device and therefore needs the drivers on install to be considered one.

I re-formatted and reinstalled win2k with the promise drivers and it runs sweet.... dunno if it makes that big a diff tho

I just installed win2k normally, then installed service pack 2. no probs, and ata100 j0rness

how do you tell if its ATA/100?

says so on the HD most of the time

or the board

um - so many people miss this.

just copy the 2k promise controlers onto a floppy, and insert them when you install your ata/scsi controller as per usual in Win2k

said drivers always come with your mainboard cd

you can actualy do a benchmark to check if your drive is working at ata100, with win2k though there is a 50-50 chance that you are runing ata100.... still its ata100 is slower than win98se's ata100

in this benchmark named Sisopht Sandra utlities my drive scores 27000 in win98se while in win2k it only does 22000, that was also after a few tweaks, before them it only scores 17000 which is slower than a ata66 7200 rpm

it all depends what motherboard you have to whether or not you need the promise drivers on a disk. On the ASUS A7M you don't have to because there are only 2 ide controllers and they support ata33/66/100. but to get 100 you need the drivers. If you don't have the drivers on it will only run at 66.

but if you have a motherboard like the ASUS A7V then you will need the drivers on a disk because there are 4 ide channel slots, 2 are ata100 and he other 2 are 33/66 slots.

an easy solution for people that don't want to put on the ata100 drivers at ther start is to plug into the ata 33/66 slots install windows install ata100 drivers then change the calbes over.