I've ordered a Promise Ultra TX100 ATA controller for work as the onboard IDE chipset won't play with XP. The bios sees it as a UDMA66 hdd yet window insists on setting the transfer rate at UDMA33.

Has anyone installed a controller card in the past, boot windows up on the onboard installed the drivers for the PCI card, then connect the hdd to the PCI controller and then boot off the PCI card. Will Windows work or is it going to need a full reinstall????

I don't know if that is enough of a hardware change to mess up XP. I have personally not had to do this but I've seen these issues before. On my old P4 board my HDD's were all running at 33 (or 66, can't remember) in XP, I'm kinda glad it fried a couple of months ago. Now they are running at 100 on my AMD board.

AMD chipsets are usually better:)

Having said that this one is an old AMD K-2, although it's a ALi (Acer) chipset which are very poor, god I hate Acers. There's another Acer with a ALi chipset in the dept which needs ALi drivers rather than the M$ otherwise that run's in PIO mode!!!!! and that's a ATA100 drive......

My wife's computer has a Promise UltraTX133 and it works at 133. Just make sure that you update the firmware/bios for the PCI card and update the drivers in Windows. I also remember having a slightly hard time getting the BIOS settings working correctly, but that only delt with it booting off of it and not the on-board crap.

I look forward to the fun when it arrives

In answer to my question yes you can.

Plug the PCI ide controller in, boot windows with the onboard ide. Install the drivers for the PCI IDE controller, power off. Swap the cable over, set the bios to boot from SCSI and away you go.

Very simple no hassle what so ever.

Will see if it's still working tomorrow.