How to solve SATA Woes... (GA-K8NXP-SLI)

[fixxxer0]

First of all, Gigabyte tech support was very helpful and knowledgeable. It actually sounded like I had someone on the phone that knew more than me.

This is kinda a like "duh" problem. But to be honest, everyone here was very misleading in the "SP2 upgraded CD's detect the raid controllers."

As I was informed they don't. Windows will SEE the drive, but you will have problems on rebooting, cold boots, detecting HD's again. (on both the SiL controller and Nforce4).

What you have to do is put in the CD with all the drivers on it and go to the folder "BootDrv" on the root of the CD. In there you must execute the program "Menu.exe".

You need two blank floppies and option G is the SiL controller (RED SATA connection on mobo) drivers, and option E is the nForce 4 XP (YELLOW/ORANGE SATA connections) drivers.



Once you have these floppies, go ahead and make sure IDE/RAID is off (unless you are using it), and RAID5 function is off in the bios.

Now you just install windows, load the drivers, for nForce4 controller it will list two. YOU NEED BOTH! hit S to specify again and load the second. If you have hard drives on both controllers throw the other floppy in and load those drivers.


All problems fixed, installs fine, cold boots/warmboots/restarts/hybernates/hotswaps perfectly!

 

[integramodder]

will it work with something other than a floppy?

 

[fixxxer0]

negative

 

[integramodder]

where are you getting these drivers?

 

[fixxxer0]

read the post...... if you cant follow it then god help you

The CD containing the drivers, it comes with the motherboard, and says....you guessed it, DRIVERS on it.

 

[TempNZ]

Ive done this. Installed three SATA drives in the yellow ports and made the driver disk with the Menu function (selected E).

When I load up with no driver disk (no F6) windows reports all drives but any partition created is RAW and unreadable.

When I use F6 and load the drivers from the disk winxp reports no harddrives installed.

Tearing my hair out here... 🙁

Same motherboard btw.

 

[imported_cjunky]

What you need to do is this:

1) you must create a raid. Even if you want to use single disks. If this is the case, just hit F10, then add your first disk to a "spanning" type array. Leave the stripe at optimal.
Complete that step and you will create a one disk JBOD. Repeat this step until all your single disks are individual JBODS.

Choose one of the disks to make bootable or you wont be able to boot.

2) Now startup the xp installer, when prompted hit F6 to install drivers. Use the appropriate driver for your RAID as discussed in earlier posts in this thread.

Once loaded you will find that the disks are visable under windows and can be installed to.

If you cannot see the disks or they appear as "UNKNOWN" disk types, or windows bluescreens, then you havent created a RAID configuration (Step 1)


Good Luck


Cj