Question about hooking up SATA drives

[dotty675]

Hi there; sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong section, I've never posted here before. My friend has a new system with an Athlon 64 3700 and a K8N-E Deluxe. He wants to hook up one SATA DVD-R drive and two SATA hard drives. He doesn't want a RAID, just two hard drives, one for storage and one for the OS. Right now the whole system's put together except for one of the hard drives, because the board only has two SATA ports (it actually has four others, but they're all marked as being only for a RAID setup). My question is, what are the options for hooking up this second hard drive? I don't really know anything about SATA so I don't know if you can hook up two drives to one cable in a master/slave setup like you can with IDE drives. We did buy a PCI card that had two extra SATA ports on it, but we couldn't find any drivers to go with it that supported Windows 64-bit. Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Woody419]

You really running the XP 64 bit os? I thought it is still in alpha testing. The Athlon64 runs 32 bit XP too, which is what most people buy. Under Onboard Device, set the Silicone Image Mode [RAID Mode] to SATA in the BIOS and that should do it.

 

[kextyn]

XP x64 Release Candidate 2 was available last time I checked weeks ago.

 

[dotty675]

Alright, I'll try that; thanks. And yeah, it's only been available for a month or so.

 

[dotty675]

Well, I tried out your suggestion but the drive wasn't recognized; anything else I'm supposed to do? Thanks.

 

[billyjak]

Your probably not going to find the drivers for a beta setup.
Try the 32 bit drivers and see if they install, or your going to have to email or call the maker of the PCI card and see if they have the 64bit drivers ready.