Intel mobos and SATA drives

perdomot

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Dec 7, 2004
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Building an intel rig next week and wanted to know if I need special sata drivers like nf4 mobos or can I just connect the hdd and it will see it. Its going to be an 865PE rig. Thanks
 

grooge

Senior member
Dec 23, 2004
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nforce4 don't need special drivers to use SATA HDD.. neither nforce3 250GB..
 

perdomot

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Dec 7, 2004
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Well. I have to hit F6 and use a floppy with the storage and raid drivers on my last two nf4 Ultra mobos when I install XP or it doesnt see the hard drives. Wondering if intel chips work the same way
 

grooge

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Dec 23, 2004
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Because you did not disable RAID in BIOS. I've installed XP on more than 10 nf3-nf4 board of different brand and I never had to specify any drivers, unless I wanted to set up a RAID array.

Gigabyte motherboard were notorious for shipping with RAID enabled for SATA connectors. And RAID is no use with single drive on these board..

Enabling RAID prevent the main BIOS to list the drive to the installer. It pass the controller to be used by the RAID bios, and in this case, the installer wouldnt see the drive, without drivers.
 

perdomot

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Dec 7, 2004
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OK, since it always asked for the storage driver and then the raid driver, I figured without the storage driver, the XP installation couldnt see the hdd.
 

grooge

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Dec 23, 2004
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It was asking because BIOS was set to RAID. If RAID was disabled, it wouldn't have to ask.