how do you install a sata device on a prior windows installation?

[elny3680]

ive got a soltek sl-k890. my brother got me a 300 gb sata seagate & im trying to set it up. so far it is being detected by the promise fasttrack controller(?) but when it boots in to windows, it doesn't show up. from the mobo manuals it says to boot from windows cd & press f6 to load drivers, so i do that for the raid drivers, sata drivers & the promise drivers just for good measure. it never says anything about installing it, just loading it so im assuming it never gets written to the hard drive.

my current hard drive is a 120gb western. how do i go about installing this thing? are sata device drivers & such supposed to be installed at the beginning of all installations? any help is much appreciated

 

[CalvinHobbes]

So you just want to add this to an existing install or install XP fresh on it?

 

[elny3680]

i just want to add it to an existing install, is that possible?

 

[CalvinHobbes]

Sure. You shouldn't need to do anything but initialize the drive in Disk Management.

Right-click "my computer" and select Manage. Then go to Disk Management. You should get a wizard to help you with the rest.

 

[orion23]

The best and easiest way is to use the Seagate utility provided on the CD or just download it from their website.
It will only take you about 2 minutes to get it working since most drives are pre-formatted now days!

 

[corkyg]

There are a few older mobos such as my Asus P4PE that will only handle SATA if it is put into RAID. With 1 SATA drive, that means it has to be a RAID 0. I have a SATA drive I use for data - and that's how it has to be. On boot, the Promise controller initializes it and declares it "Functional." It then is accepted easily by Windows.

Newer mobos allow SATA w/o RAID.

 

[elny3680]

it still does not show up, either in manage disks or through the seagate utility. fasttrack says the drive is functional, i just can't access it. its setup as 1+0 stripe. any ideas on what i need to do? my setup

sl-k890 pro 939
windows xp pro sp2
amd 64 3000+
wd 120 gb (boot)
seagate 300 gb sata (storage)

 

[BadThad]

Listen to what corkyg said, your mobo may only support a SATA drive if you have a RAID configuration. You cannot setup a RAID with a single disk, so the 0+1 config simply will not work.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: BadThad
Listen to what corkyg said, your mobo may only support a SATA drive if you have a RAID configuration. You cannot setup a RAID with a single disk, so the 0+1 config simply will not work.

I have a mobo (P4PE) which requires RAID to use SATA - I have a single SATA drive setup as RAID 0 - keeps Fastrack happy and works perfectly. That plus the mobo's driver (fasttx2k.sys) puts it all together.

Try manually copying your driver to |Windows\System32\Drivers.

 

[elny3680]

so i guess my options are to either get another drive for the raid configuration or disable raid & hope it is detected after boot up. i will try to copy the drivers into windows if nothing else helps. would that corrupt/crash or muck up anything if i just copy drivers over? thanks

 

[corkyg]

Use the driver's INF file so it gets registered. Otherwise it will just sit there.