IceBreakerG
Member
Hello everyone. I finally got the parts to build my new system on Friday. I started building the system friday night, and didn't finish until last night (it got late, i was tired and had to work). Well, after i finished up everything last night, i set up the BIOS to my liking (for the most part), and for my boot order, i have
1.) Floppy
2.) CD-Rom
3.) Hard Disk
There is no option for SCSI, RAID or SATA in the boot order sequence. I have the hard drives on the Silicon Image 3114 SATA controller, and it detects it when it goes through its check, but under the drives, it says "no valide drives..." (that 'e' is supposed to be there at the end of valid). I can boot from my windows cd, and i use the Sil3114 driver from the motherboard cd to load the device in windows setup. After it goes through that, windows see's my 2 SATA hard drives (160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 and a 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ drives). I'm installing windows on the 160GB SATA drive. After i format the drive (quick format) and windows copies the setup files over to the drive, it reboots, and it keeps looping back to the cd. It will not boot from the SATA hard drive. Can anyone help me get this working? Its starting to drive me crazy 🙁
Edit: I "think" i may have found a possible solution. I just went through the manual for the motherboard thoroughly, and it seems that i may either "have" to set up a raid config as a JBOD or i'm possibly using the "wrong" serial ata controller driver when i try to install XP Pro. Apparently, out of the 3 choices that are available for the Sil3114 controller, you MUST use the Sil3114 Raid5 driver for windows installation regardless of whether you're using a raid or non-raid setup. Unfortunately, because i am at work now, i will not be able to find this out for myself until around 7:30pm (yeah, i work 12hr shifts). But hopefully if this works, I will let you all know sometime tonight or tomorrow. If anyone else, has any suggestions, please let me know.
Edit #2: After further investigation of this issue, i've found out that the system will NOT report SATA drives to the BIOS unless a raid set is created. For users who want to install Windows on an SATA drive and can not specify the SATA drive in the boot order, this seems like the cause. I think that creating a JBOD set in the BIOS Raid Utility will allow the system to report the drive to the BIOS so that it can be selected. I do not know this for fact yet, as i have not been able to test this out. But if i find any more information, i will let everyone know. Hopefully this will help me out as well as anyone else who has this problem.
Edit #3: Alright, i went home for lunch because this has been bugging the hell out of me all morning. I did what the manual said. I created a JBOD for my 160GB SATA HDD. Saved the settings in the Raid Bios Utility. Rebooted, went into the main bios, checked the boot order for Hard Disk Boot Priority, sure enough, the JBOD i had just set up was now listed in the Bios as the first boot drive. I saved the Bios settings, and tried to boot to the hard drive (I tried to run windows setup last night) and i got a hardware error, saying it couldn't boot from the drive. Rebooted to the windows cd, and used the Sil3114 Raid5 driver, loaded that, formatted the hard drive again, and ran windows setup. This time, success. After the setup files had been copied off the cd, it booted into the main windows setup from the hard drive. So this has proven to work correctly. I hope this helps someone who may be having a similar problem.
1.) Floppy
2.) CD-Rom
3.) Hard Disk
There is no option for SCSI, RAID or SATA in the boot order sequence. I have the hard drives on the Silicon Image 3114 SATA controller, and it detects it when it goes through its check, but under the drives, it says "no valide drives..." (that 'e' is supposed to be there at the end of valid). I can boot from my windows cd, and i use the Sil3114 driver from the motherboard cd to load the device in windows setup. After it goes through that, windows see's my 2 SATA hard drives (160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 and a 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ drives). I'm installing windows on the 160GB SATA drive. After i format the drive (quick format) and windows copies the setup files over to the drive, it reboots, and it keeps looping back to the cd. It will not boot from the SATA hard drive. Can anyone help me get this working? Its starting to drive me crazy 🙁
Edit: I "think" i may have found a possible solution. I just went through the manual for the motherboard thoroughly, and it seems that i may either "have" to set up a raid config as a JBOD or i'm possibly using the "wrong" serial ata controller driver when i try to install XP Pro. Apparently, out of the 3 choices that are available for the Sil3114 controller, you MUST use the Sil3114 Raid5 driver for windows installation regardless of whether you're using a raid or non-raid setup. Unfortunately, because i am at work now, i will not be able to find this out for myself until around 7:30pm (yeah, i work 12hr shifts). But hopefully if this works, I will let you all know sometime tonight or tomorrow. If anyone else, has any suggestions, please let me know.
Edit #2: After further investigation of this issue, i've found out that the system will NOT report SATA drives to the BIOS unless a raid set is created. For users who want to install Windows on an SATA drive and can not specify the SATA drive in the boot order, this seems like the cause. I think that creating a JBOD set in the BIOS Raid Utility will allow the system to report the drive to the BIOS so that it can be selected. I do not know this for fact yet, as i have not been able to test this out. But if i find any more information, i will let everyone know. Hopefully this will help me out as well as anyone else who has this problem.
Edit #3: Alright, i went home for lunch because this has been bugging the hell out of me all morning. I did what the manual said. I created a JBOD for my 160GB SATA HDD. Saved the settings in the Raid Bios Utility. Rebooted, went into the main bios, checked the boot order for Hard Disk Boot Priority, sure enough, the JBOD i had just set up was now listed in the Bios as the first boot drive. I saved the Bios settings, and tried to boot to the hard drive (I tried to run windows setup last night) and i got a hardware error, saying it couldn't boot from the drive. Rebooted to the windows cd, and used the Sil3114 Raid5 driver, loaded that, formatted the hard drive again, and ran windows setup. This time, success. After the setup files had been copied off the cd, it booted into the main windows setup from the hard drive. So this has proven to work correctly. I hope this helps someone who may be having a similar problem.
