ABIT AV8 SATA issues

[Nintendork]

I am having serious troubles trying to get my SATA drive(s) to work with my new AV8 3rd Eye board, and I would really appreciate any help.

I previously had an ABIT KV7 with a AMD Athlon XP 3200+ with one Hitachi 250GB SATA drive as my boot drive. (The second Hitachi is new.) It worked perfectly.

My new board simply does not wish to boot if the SATA drive(s) is/are plugged in. When there was an operating system on the Hitachi drive (I have since formatted it), it would just stop at the ?Verifying DMI Settings? screen. When there is a Windows XP CD in the drive ready to boot, it will say ?Boot from CD:?, but it will just freeze. When it freezes during these times, the hard drive light will remain on.

None of these problems occur if I unconnect the SATA drives.

I was able to install Windows onto my WD IDE drive (only when the SATA drives were unconnected). Then, I connected the SATA drive, and I was able to install the driver for the SATA controller and move everything I wanted to save over to the WD drive.

I have the latest ABIT bios (Release 19). I?m not sure if I have the latest VIA VT 8237 bios (I have 4.31).

Further, after I set up a RAID array with the two Hitachi SATA drives, the screen (where it says to hit <tab> ) says that both drives are ?None RAID?.

Please help me guys!

 

[grooge]

Well, if you have to install SATA driver, the you are using a PCI SATA controller, even if it is onboard, and not the one provided bythe chipset.

In this case, you have to make sure that RAID is activated for that controller in BIOS, or with a jumper on the motherboard. Then, when you'll start the system, during post, you should have a message telling you to press some keys to create the array. Once the array created, you'll reboot, have the RAID drivers floppy disk ready (you may have to make one with the correct drivers if you only had a CD with your motherboard... read the manual for that) and when you'll see, at the bottom of the screen "press F6 to install third party RAID drivers", do it. nothing will appears now, but later you'll be asked for the floppy. All that should be explained in your manual.. It should have a RAID section explainig how to set up an array. If not, check at Abit website for downloadable manual for your board.