Big disk - problems - (long-ish)

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

Well, I tried putting my new 46GB drive in my MP3 machine over the last
couple of days...

First off, despite having been under the distinct impression that all these
new ATA-XX drives were supposed to be backwards-compatible with earlier IDE
/ ATA interfaces, it steadfastly refused to work on the motherboards
"standard" IDE interfaces (which are ATA-33) - The interface
refused to even
"see" the drive attached, and in fact hung the boot process when
scanning
the devices. (it would scan and report all devices UP TO, but not
including,
wherever I attached it).

Having fallen at the first hurdle, I realised I'd have no choice other than
to put it on one of the extra ATA-66 interfaces on the motherboard (these
were previously unused). There are no settings in the CMOS setup to
explicitly enable/disable the ATA-66 ports, - this happens automatically
dependent on whether it detects any devices attached. So, having attached
it
and switched on, the HPT366 detected it, and therefore enabled the ATA-66
BIOS. Then all I had to do was to install the HPT366 drivers in Windows
2000.

I should add, that prior to this point I had flashed the motherboard BIOS
to
the Latest available from ABIT, which included the latest BIOS for the
HPT366 as well, and also got the latest HPT366 Windows 2000 drivers From
Highpoint.

Having done all that, Windows 2000 worked its P&P magic, detected the
interface, prompted for the drivers etc... All seemed to be well, the disk
became visible in disk Manager, and I formatted it OK, and copied all the
data to it. HOWEVER, - to carry out the installation, I took the PC off the
LAN and had it on my workbench... - relevance of this? - read on...

It seems that the W2K P&P manager has assigned IRQ11 to the ATA-66
controller, which is the same as used by the LAN card. As both are PCI
devices, they should in theory be OK to share an interrupt, but we all know
that theory and practice are rather different! - These two devices
obviously
don't like sharing IRQ11, as the machine now blue-screens with an
"IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" stop error whenever certain actions are
performed
(like playing an MP3 from that drive from another PC on the LAN, or
curiously, attempting to reinstall SP1).

Still undeterred, I thought: "no problem" - I'll just reconfigure
one of
these devices manually, as I know IRQ7 is free. Trouble is, in device
manager, all the config options are greyed out (Yes, I _AM_ a local
administrator, so it's not a permissions issue). Upshot is, I can't
manually
reassign any of the hardware resources for either of these 2 devices, and
they are definately causing a problem - I can "disable" either
one of them,
and the problem goes away (along with the functionality!).

Short of trying a whole new clean W2K install (which I'd rather avoid, as
I'll obviously have to reinastall all the software, and there's quite a bit
of it!), - and which also is no guarantee of success, anyone have any ideas
as to how I can force either of these to use manually assigned hardware
resources?

Motherboard = ABIT BE6 (BIOS = whatever the very latest is!)
ATA-66 controller = Highpoint HPT366 (BIOS rev. 1.25)

Cheers.

Paul g.
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