Hello Zbigniew,

  ZB> My main HDD is jumpered as "master" - and it's alone
    > on the HPT370.

Is the new drive jumpered as secondary or "slave"?

If you temporarily disconnect both the CD-R and Zip drives
from your integrated "ordinary" ATA host bus adaptor's
secondary channel and add the new hard disk there, does your
PC's firmware still try to boot from it? Does your machine
boot normally from your existing drive on the HPT370? Does
the new drive show up in the output from dmesg?

You could also try disabling the HPT370 and booting your
existing drive from the (re-enabled) primary channel of your
on-board "ordinary" host bus adaptor. My guess would be that
a single drive is not likely to sustain data rates faster
than UltraDMA mode 2 (33 Mbytes/sec), in which case it would
not pose a bottleneck.

- Andy Ball