Im having trouble setting up my WD Raptor drive

[Viper96720]

What motherboard is it? The sata raid drivers on the disk are the drivers. Your just using the controller in a single drive config. You'll get unknown hard error since no drivers
are loaded for the device. Windows has no idea what the thing is and how to use it.
installing drive in XP

 

[fredtam]

Originally posted by: Viper96720
What motherboard is it? The sata raid drivers on the disk are the drivers. Your just using the controller in a single drive config. You'll get unknown hard error since no drivers
are loaded for the device. Windows has no idea what the thing is and how to use it.
installing drive in XP

This is true for the silicon image chip only(ports 3&4). The ich5r needs only to have a drive plugged in and the chipset drivers installed. It is reccognized as an additional ide channel when only one drive is installed without the need for the raid drivers. The chipset drivers are the sata controller drivers. The si chip is different because it is no more than a controller card hooked to the pci bus. The intel drivers are for raid.

 

[NinjaGnome]

Well the drive is broken. This is the only answer to the problem. A lot of you are confused with whats going on. I have 2 drives, one is the WD raptor, the other is a WD 120gb Special edition hooked up to Serial ATA with the seriallel thing that comes with the abit motherboard. I can install and run Windows XP off of the western digital special edition but i can not get it to install on the raptor. Also when i do install on the special edition and the raptor is on slave it still doesnt show the raptor up. This leads me to believe that the drive is broken. Loading the drivers off the floppy isnt necessary cause if it was I wouldnt be able to even install on to the disc as it would not show up in the setup. I have also tried it with the driver floppy disc to load the serial ata drivers but it gives me the same result. Ive also tried to just have the raptor drive by itself and see if that would work but it doesnt. So unless there is something im completely missing then the drive is just broken.

 

[fredtam]

I was thinking the drive was FU but RMAs are a pain in the a$$ so its always best to try all options first.

 

[stevel114]

I'm not really sure what motherboard you have or what sata controller you are trying to use. This I do know, if you have a sata raid controller (I have 2, abit with highpoint AT7MAX2 and Asus with SI Nforce2 ,you should set it up first as a single drive with no other drives attached. You will also have to go into the controller bios and setup the drive a raid 0 with just one drive. When the computer boots it should show the drive by itself in the controller bios screen. After that follow my suggestions in the previous post and you should be OK. The RAID should be turned on in the system bios and set to boot to it. If your bios has a boot sequence the for the Raid or SCSI set it to that. The errors I've read do not sound like a bad drive, just incorrect setup. Usually when you get bad dll errors it can be the wrong driver is loading in windows. Remember that until windows loads it uses a generic driver that just allows minimal IO to the device until the right driver can be loaded.

 

[stevel114]

I just went looking for the drive you are talking about and found some reviews that you might find interesting. Seems that alot of people are having problems setting up the drive. http://secure.newegg.com/app/CustratingReview.asp?item=22-144-200