NEED HELP -- D975XBX2 -- Sata Drives

[GamingDaemon]

Well besides the huge 250mm fan not working on my Enermax Chakra case, things went pretty well for my new BadAxe2/E6600/evGA8800GTX build.

But I forgot to F6 the RAID drivers for my Sata drives, not that I have a floppy drive anyway. Can I still make this work with SATA versus IDE?

Thanks in advance!

 

[GamingDaemon]

No response yet, so I thought I would ask again. I want to take advantage of the SATA2 capabilities of my SATA drives, I'm not using RAID.

I am confused as to whether I need to set the BIOS to IDE or RAID or ACHI to make this happen since I didn't use the F6 option when I instaleld VISTA. Do I need to re-install?

 

[runestone]

I'm on xp pro with a BX2r, so I'm not sure about Vista.. You can d/l the raid drivers from Intel site. One must enable raid in the bios(not using it here).
My sata's are set to IDE; once set it stays that way-trying to change to ACHI stops my system from booting to windows. I've not noticed any difference in speed with the IDE setting, and the drives are recognized as sata on the blue Intel connectors.

 

[GamingDaemon]

Originally posted by: runestone
I'm on xp pro with a BX2r, so I'm not sure about Vista.. You can d/l the raid drivers from Intel site. One must enable raid in the bios(not using it here).
My sata's are set to IDE; once set it stays that way-trying to change to ACHI stops my system from booting to windows. I've not noticed any difference in speed with the IDE setting, and the drives are recognized as sata on the blue Intel connectors.

So are you sure you are getting SATA2 speeds or at least better than IDE speeds? And I get the BSOD when I set the BIOS to anything but IDE. I don't have a floppy drive so the F6 option when installing Vista is not possible for me. I don't want RAID, I really just want SATA but I can't tell if they are being recognized that way. I am using the black SATA connectors.

 

[runestone]

http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/imst/sb/cs-015988.htm
http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-020811.htm#speed

Daemon, you may have already been there, but some info for you.
Have you tried just downloading the raid drivers for the Marvel and Intel and running them from Windows?
I've not done a speed check with a program yet for the sata drives.

 

[GamingDaemon]

Well I re-installed Vista and used my USB drive to provide the install with the drivers when I hit F6. The trick in all this was to get the drivers out of the .exe file from Intel since I don't have a floppy drive. Fortunately, I read that you can pass command-line arguments to the .exe and one of them is to extract the drivers. Specifically:

<driverfilename>.exe -A -P<path>

Thank you, runestone, for pointing me in the right direction. The funny thing is, according to HD Tach, the drivers aren't any faster, so maybe I had the drivers installed under Vista, I just couldn't boot using ACHI.

Now, in the BIOS, I can set ACHI and boot to Vista. YEAH!

Now, I just need to get the fan problem fixed on my Enermax Chakra case, and I will be 100%!

Thank you everyone.

 

[dajeepster]

yeah... I used the USB drive when installing vista on this board with a raid0. I wanted to do a dual boot, but I didn't have an available floppy drive for xp.... vista works fine.

 

[BigShroom]

You should run HD Tach, I'm curious to see if your SATA drive is faster than mine on the IDE mode.

WD SE16 500gig (5000AAKS) SATA2 tested on 32mb hd tach

I'm also using the bx2 with the black(intel) sata connectors.

 

[imported_RedStar]

well i just read up on this over at |H| --seems my sata was put in IDE mode even though i had vista and the ACHI driver built in.

So i made the registry change (turning on the ACHI vista driver) and then changed bios to ACHI mode.

According to a review NCQ should have made my windows load 6 seconds faster. But i did not notice a difference. Still. I am pleased

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1161240

 

[GamingDaemon]

Originally posted by: BigShroom
You should run HD Tach, I'm curious to see if your SATA drive is faster than mine on the IDE mode.

WD SE16 500gig (5000AAKS) SATA2 tested on 32mb hd tach

I'm also using the bx2 with the black(intel) sata connectors.

Hey BigShroom, I did use HDTach, it's what told me that the speed was essentially the same.

Now, I am posting the results for my two drives which are a bit slower than yours. We are not comparing mushrooms to mushrooms here, though, because of the differences betwen drives (I have a WD 80GB hard drrive and a Seagate 320GB drive), processor (E6600 no overclocking) and memory (G.Skill 2x1GB DDR2-800).

Here are my results:
[*] WD 80GB Drive
[*] Seagate 320GB Drive

 

[GamingDaemon]

Originally posted by: RedStar
well i just read up on this over at |H| --seems my sata was put in IDE mode even though i had vista and the ACHI driver built in.

So i made the registry change (turning on the ACHI vista driver) and then changed bios to ACHI mode.

According to a review NCQ should have made my windows load 6 seconds faster. But i did not notice a difference. Still. I am pleased

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1161240

It took me a while to find the exact posting in that thread to which you are referring, but here's the link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article.

Having re-installed Vista and used my USB drive to install the RAID drivers, I am able to boot with ACHI enabled in the BIOS already. However, I decided to check the registry setting mentioned in that article, and I have a value of 4 (four) there instead of a 0 (zero). Not sure what that means, but I am not going to touch it.

Anyone know what it means??