I've never used a PCI card to hook up my drives before, so excuse me if I revert to a noob for a while. I currently have 4 hard drives on my computer, along with 2 burners (NEC3500 for burning, Lite-On 1653 for ripping, reading, error scanning). I have 2 sata drives attached to my intel board, the burners each getting their own channel on the board, and the card gets one SATA and one IDE drive. Sounds reasonable, no?

By the way, this is on XP Pro, SP2, with a reasonably fresh install (reformatted last month).

Here's where the problem comes in: The Maxtor PATA drive on the promise card takes forever to access. I'll open "my computer", click on the Maxtor to open it, and it'll either pause for 10 seconds or so and continue as normal, or explorer will crash trying to open the drive. I'll get the typical "not responding" message, explorer crashes, and comes back up again. USUALLY, I can access the drive correctly after that. I can't replicate the problem exactly, it's almost as random as a coin flip. 50% it wont access, 50% it will. Anyone have any experience with this? OH, and my IDE cables from the burners won't reach the hard drive, or I'd hook it up as a slave to my Lite-On. It's a crowded case. I'm also hesitant to put my Lite-On on the Promise card and the hard drive on the MB, because I know the burner doesn't work well in that situation.

I'm confused, where are all the hard drives connected? Is this a SATA card or PATA? It sounds like a Promise TX2-plus (RAID) card, which shouldn't be having any issues. But you're not using RAID? And you also have a Intel chipset-based SATA controller?

On the motherboard, I have 2 SATA drives, the NEC on the primary IDE channel, and the Lite-On on the secondary IDE. On the Promise, I have 1 SATA and 1 PATA hard drive. No raid anywhere. The board is the Intel 875 MB.

Make sure you have the drives jumpered correctly. I'm still not sure what Promise card you have.

It's the SATA150 TX2, and yeah, everything is set at master on it's own channel. I'm going to try isolating if it's an IRQ issue by removing my PCI cards.

This is a RAID card. (AFAIK) How are you setting up the drives in the card BIOS? Are they arrays of 1 drive each, or are you using a non-RAID BIOS? What does the card BIOS say about how the drives are assigned and recognised?

Actually, this isn't the raid version, it's the normal one. Link to the product is: HERE

And the BIOS sees them as SCSI drives, but during the boot process, it shows the Promise screen and the drives are displayed/detected normally. I think I might swap my top hard drive on the stack with the bottom (problematic maxtor) and see if the problem disappears when I hook the Maxtor up as the slave to the Lite-On on the MB's secondary IDE channel. Of course, this is after I'm done studying for my finals, so it'll have to wait a few days. School is kicking my ass right now.