Help with SATA harddrive installation.

[Xeoneex]

Ok, so I recently upgraded my computer. New CPU, new motherboard, Soltek SL-K8TPro-939 socket. Has SATA support. I bought a nice 160 SATA drive. I installed everything, had a few problems, but then I went to install the SATA drive. Now before I did that, I hadn't reformated yet to finish some things that I forgot. So I wanted to check out the drive. I used the tools that came with the drive, it showed up perfectly fine. Even formated it and whatnot. Then I had to reformat my drive with winxp on it. I decided to put it on my new SATA drive. So I load up XP in DOS etc... Go to reformat the drive, but for some reason the SATA drive wont show up in the Bios screen where its suppose to show CH1SATAMaster/Secondary drives. Nothigns there, but the screen PRIOR to that showed the drive. It even came up in BIOS. So I figured it was driver issues. But at this point I couldn't realy do anything cuase I had formatted my drive. So went to just screw it formatted my old C drive and put windows just so I could get the SATA drive recognized so I could install windows on IT. installed windows on the old drive, installed basic motherboard drivers, SATA did not come up. Went into bios didn't even come up in the bios. I then put the drive cd in and did diag, it came up with an error but no specific info. After with some bios fiddling we got it to show up as the promise mode 579 just before its suppose to show it as master drive 0 etc.. Still wont show as a drive. Wont even come up when I use the diag tools from this CD. It is just not there. Yet it is. I'm so bloody confused I dotn know if I just blew my damn drive already, and I didn't do anything except check the cables to make sure they were still in after reformatting it, up to now. So could use some help at this point.

 

[w00t]

to lazzzy to read can you give me the main point.

 

[mechBgon]

To start with, your motherboard has two SATA controllers. One's a Promise PCI-based one (soldered to the mobo) and the other is the VIA "native" one. Soltek's download page for your board only shows RAID-mode drivers for both controllers.

If both SATA controllers really are RAID-or-else controllers, then try defining your single drive as a pseudo-array. Understand that they're not equivalent, you got to plug the drive into the controller you intend to use. Maybe more useful info here.

First you have to get the drive to show up, though, so try unplugging your PATA drive and see if your SATA drive decides to show up again. The mobo manual may have some clues in this area, I'm downloading it.

Bigger picture: you could make this whole headache go away with either a PATA drive or an nForce3/nForce4 motherboard :evil: On my nF3 and nF4 boards, installing on a Serial ATA drive is as straightforward as it is on a Parallel ATA drive. Although... hehe...

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[BOLt]

Gah, that is a lot to read. Break stuff up into paragraphs, man.

SATA is practically plug & play. There should be very few problems with it. I don't know what to tell you...

 

[Xeoneex]

Problem is my MB was a b-day present and I came from an Epox nforce2 chipset anyway this one was loads better than the other. And as far as RAID/SATA stuff I'm completely new with them. There are 4, 2 are RAID, 2 are just SATA. Mine is SATA1, standalone as you call it.
As far as the PATA, I'm assuming PATA is the old style ones. I did unplug my old ones, but the same thing happened it would not show it as a drive. It showed it was there but yet it wasn't there... And its like no matter what I try it will not show up at all. I don tknow what to do.

 

[Xeoneex]

This is confusing. After checking on the diagrams, it shows 2 dif sets of SATA connectors. 2 are connected together, these, it says, are supported by VT8237r for 2 SATA/RAID hard disks setup. Other are 2 seperatly placed ones. SATA connectors supported by PDC20579 for 2 SATA/RAID hard disks setpu. Mine is in SATA1 on the Promise 579 one. Should I put it in the VT8237R slot?

 

[mechBgon]

Try the VIA controller. Also, make sure it's in IDE mode, not RAID mode (see pages 63 and 64 of your manual).

 

[Xeoneex]

Hrm ok thanks.

 

[n7]

I cannot understand half of what the OP posted, but it seems to me he didn't have the SATA drivers on a floppy to use when installing Winblowz.

Get the correct SATA drivers for whichever SATA ports you wanna use, put them on a floppy, & hit F6 when installing Windows to add them manually.

 

[Xeoneex]

Thanks mechBgon thatwas the problem. It was in the wrong slot. I have it as my main drive now and everything works great. Thanks you are the man!