SATA HD only work with another SATA HD?

headlessjester

Junior Member
May 31, 2004
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I cant get my computer to recognize my 120G SATA HD and someone told me that SATA HD's only work in conjunction with another one. I know if you want to use RAID this is true but I dont see how they cant work solo. Plz help me find a way to get my computer to recognize my HD.
 

johnjkr1

Platinum Member
Jan 10, 2003
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Welcome to the forum headless,

No, they work fine by themselves.

Does the drive spin up? If so, is it seen by the serial ata bios? Or can windows not see it?
 

headlessjester

Junior Member
May 31, 2004
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Yes my HD does spin up but there is no option in my bios that deals with sata drives. Even after i updated the bios i cans find an sata setting or even a raid setting(which i dont want). I've gor an asus A7N8X-E Delux MB if that helps.
During the bootup i get an error that says, "Incomplete Raid set, press F4 or ctrl-S to enter raid settings" When i press F4 nothing happens, but when i press ctrl-S it lists my 120G sata hd but still wont let me in the Raid settings. Afterward I can just press ENTER and it will boot up into windows.
 

nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,808
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I'm 99% positive that it's not going to work. I've never seen a RAID controller that allows for one RAID composed of different device types (ie: a SCSI/IDE RAID0).
 

jbritt1234

Senior member
Aug 20, 2002
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Are you actually wanting to set up a RAID? Or just use your single drive? I may be wrong here, but I don't think you actually want to set up a RAID array. Just get it to see your single SATA drive. Am I correct? If you want to use RAID, then YES, you do need at least 2 drives.

What exactly are you trying to do? Are you attempting to install Windows? If so, you will need to press f6 diring the beginning of the install when it asks if you have any other dirvers you wish to install. You will need the drivers for the controller on a floppy. They may have come on a floppy with the board, or they will be on the CD that came with the board.

Look around in your BIOS again. If your SATA controller is also a RAID device, you will need to tell it to either function as a RAID device or a regular HDD controller.
 

headlessjester

Junior Member
May 31, 2004
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I dont want raid. All i want is acces to my brand new 120G HD. Ive checked many times and there is no sata setting in my bios. Since i have started this thread i have used an old ide HD and I installed windows on that and it works fine.

In my bios i have the option to search tor hard drives but it only searched for IDE drives and Im 99% sure there is no sata setting im my particulat bios.
 

jbritt1234

Senior member
Aug 20, 2002
406
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Have you tried looking in the manual to see if there is any info on it?

Did you do as I suggested before and press f6 when prompted to install drivers for the SATA controller? Windows does NOT have them. The drivers will have come with the board. Or you can go to the manuf. website.

The SATA drives will NOT show up on the main BIOS screen as the IDE ones will. Well, on most boards i've seen anyway.
 

ToeJam13

Senior member
May 18, 2004
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> Yes my HD does spin up but there is no option in my bios that deals with sata drives.
> Even after i updated the bios i cans find an sata setting or even a raid setting(which
> i dont want). I've gor an asus A7N8X-E Deluxe MB if that helps.

The Asus A7N8X-E line uses the nForce Ultra 400 chipset, which does not offer native SATA/SATA-RAID capibilities. Asus has supplimented this feature by adding an Silicon Image Sil 3112A chip to the mainboard

Since this chip is essentially a seperate PCI device built right onto the motherboard, it has its own BIOS for configuring drives and RAID sets. This is why SATA and RAID settings are excluded from the basic settings menu in the main BIOS. Furthermore, a physical jumper is used to enable or disable the SATA chipset ("SATA_EN1", near the CMOS battery), so they excluded this feature from the intergrated periphials menu in the main BIOS.

From what you've said, you can see the [F4]/CTL-S message flash across your screen, so the SATA BIOS is enabled. That's good. Now, you'll need to do two more things...

First, you need to add the SATA chip to the boot priority. In the advanced BIOS features menu of the main BIOS, switch the 'first boot device' from [HDD-0] to [SCSI]. Yes, the SATA is not a SCSI controller, but most mainboard BIOS menus flag any kind of 3rd party PCI mass storage device as 'SCSI' in that respect.

Second, you need to get the SATA chip to stop barking about a broken RAID array. After reading the documentation for this chipset, it seems that it doesn't have a "single drive" option. This is not uncommon with RAID controllers. So, you need to trick the controller, and you do this by creating a single drive RAID-0 array. Create the array, add your drive, and then save the config. This *should* do it.

Enjoy.
 

headlessjester

Junior Member
May 31, 2004
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How do I trick my computer into creating a raid set? The software is too "user friendly" and without 2 drives hooked up it wont even give me the option to creat a raid set. This, of course, is in windows. Is there a way to do it in the bios, or is there any way for me to access the raid configuration which it continiously says "Broken" during every boot.

ps. after reading that FAQ link you posted the only thing that I got from that was to remove the jumper from my HDD. I did this and all it did was move my IDE HDD from slave, which was my original plan, to the master. Also, I did change my first boot to SCSI but it didnt seam to change anything. I also tried to boot from a windows disk, winxp-pro, and when it said press F6 to declare third party device, I pressed F6, again, and again, and again, and nothing happened. I tried to press F6 on my initial install of windows but had the same result.
 

headlessjester

Junior Member
May 31, 2004
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I finally found that my 120G hard drive is being considered a cd-rom drive by my computer. Wierd, but i guess i understand now what people were talking about in this post. I found it in my hardwear utility and I tried to update the drivers. It said that the drivers it had were more up to date than the ones i had, there is no way this is true. Should I click "uninstall driver" and then install my new drivers? I just dont want to loose my HDD again to sone other location that will take me another week to find.