Installing SATA Drives not working

[MDeezy]

Hello All,

New to these forums, but not new to comptuers.

I have a delima that I havent been able to resolve. I've been trying to install my two SATA 80Gig maxtor hard drives. They would not be recognized by windows at all. I want to install a OS on these drives and have one as the primary with an OS installed and the 2nd as anotehr drive. I dont want a RAID but I can not seem to get them to work.

WHen I boot my mother board recognizes them (Asus P4g8x deluxe). I updated my bios from 1003 to the lastest 1006. The board still recognized the SATA drives, but when I go to install windows it wont recognize the hard drives.

I tried installing XP with SP1, I read a thread where the SP2 disk may recognize it, I will try that tonight but I have heard bad things about SP2 and dont want to update to it.

Also, How come I would have no power routed to the hard drive just data but the mothe board still recognizes the drives?

sorry for the long post and thanks for the help.
Marlon

 

[Bozo Galora]

those delima's are hard to solve

recognition in post just means bios has queried HDD and the controller on their PC has answered with info on what it is. Thats all.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1743849&enterthread=y

 

[21stHermit]

Marlon,

I'll probably get slapped for this, but ...

I believe XP is not SATA aware, hence you have to install a SATA RAID controller when you load the OS. I believe its F6 very early in the XP install. As I remember it also has to be on a floppy, not a CD.

Your MB's BIOS is SATA aware and you should see the drives in the boot screen.

HTH,
Hermit

 

[obeseotron]

It's more complicated than XP not being "SATA aware." XP will only see drives on the chipset's hard drive controller and not on any external one without extra drivers from a floppy (F6). Most older chipsets rely on some kind of external controller for SATA. Nforce3 and 4 boards as well as newer Intel boards (can't say for sure how new on the Intel side) have SATA controllers integrated on the chipset and thus Windows can see the drives without any extra drivers during installation. However RAIDed drives will never be seen without extra drivers even on these newer chipsets. Make a floppy with the related drivers and press F6 during installation, if you have no floppy get ready to learn about "slipstreaming raid drivers". This process is very stupid and takes a good deal of trial and error. Really wish MS would have included the option to get the driver off a cd or thumb drive, apparently Vista has it...

 

[WebDude]

My very quick research on your mb tells me the sata ports are driven off a Silicon Image 3112A controller. Windows install needs the driver to recognize that controller. That driver is not among the deivice drivers included on the Windows installation CD. Therefore, you need to feed the driver to windows install by pressing F6 at the beginning of the install, and then when prompted insert the floppy disk with the driver on it so windows install can load it and then find your sata drive(s).

 

[stu1811]

When you set it up choose raid and select JBOD(Just a Bunch of Disks)