Formating SATA Drive on P4PE

  • Thread starter Thread starter Avery
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A

Avery

I have been working with an ASUS P4PE motherboard with three ULTRA ATA
drives for about a year. No Raid. I just bought a Serial ATA drive and
am attempting to format it.

I connected only the SATA drive and booted via WIN 98 floppy. I'm a
little sketchy on what to do next. I think I'm supposed to run FDISK.
If yes then I receive the error "no fixed disks present."

I intend to install a single SATA drive on the P4PE, without RAID. I'm
not clear on what to do next.

Ultimatly I would like to run three ULTRA ATA drives and one SATA
drive, all non RAID. The manual isn't clear if this configurtion is
possible.

Thank you for any help.
-- Avery
 
Did the drive not come with a utilities CD? That would allow you to format
the drive. Also, if the drive isn't new, it may be in NTFS format. Which if
I'm correct, Dos can't see. (I'm half asleep here but I hope this helped)
I have been working with an ASUS P4PE motherboard with three ULTRA ATA
drives for about a year. No Raid. I just bought a Serial ATA drive and
am attempting to format it.

I connected only the SATA drive and booted via WIN 98 floppy. I'm a
little sketchy on what to do next. I think I'm supposed to run FDISK.
If yes then I receive the error "no fixed disks present."

I intend to install a single SATA drive on the P4PE, without RAID. I'm
not clear on what to do next.

Ultimatly I would like to run three ULTRA ATA drives and one SATA
drive, all non RAID. The manual isn't clear if this configurtion is
possible.

Thank you for any help.
-- Avery
 
I have been working with an ASUS P4PE motherboard with three ULTRA ATA
drives for about a year. No Raid. I just bought a Serial ATA drive and
am attempting to format it.

I connected only the SATA drive and booted via WIN 98 floppy. I'm a
little sketchy on what to do next. I think I'm supposed to run FDISK.
If yes then I receive the error "no fixed disks present."

I intend to install a single SATA drive on the P4PE, without RAID. I'm
not clear on what to do next.

Ultimatly I would like to run three ULTRA ATA drives and one SATA
drive, all non RAID. The manual isn't clear if this configurtion is
possible.

Thank you for any help.
-- Avery
Click to expand...

If it is a RAID only controller, you might try entering the
RAID BIOS via <control-F>. The RAID BIOS has to load and
detect some drive(s) to work with, for that key combo to work.
Some RAID controllers will accept a request to prepare a
single drive (I expect it is declared to be a RAID 1 mirror, but
with only one drive in the mirror, making it effectively a
single drive). Use the "Auto Setup" option and see what happens.

If you download the pdc20376.zip driver file from the Asus web
site, the ZIP file has a Win9x-ME.txt file in it. Have a look
at that.

HTH,
Paul
 
D said:
You need to install sata drivers, whether you use raid or not
Click to expand...
I am working through the same issue (although I presently have a problem
with the drive's boot sector being recognized). After I installed the
Promise driver from the zip file, I changed the BIOS (Advanced, then
scroll all the way down the page to PCI..., I think, highlight that, and
look for the option for the Promise SATA/RAID in the list. Only when
that is enabled will you see the option for the Onboard ATA First) to
enable the Promise RAID, and set the Onboard ATA First to enabled (it is
per instructions in the manual pager 5-25---the manual is available for
download from the ASUS website). On boot, the RAID BIOS option is
entered with Control-F. What I finally figured out was to set the
single drive as a RAID0 array of one disk (that basically was the only
option) and that seems to do it.

For anyone who has set this up: it is the case that during POST, when
the Primary Hard Disk is being sought that the message returns that
there is none? That seems to be the case for me and after that, the
Promise BIOS states that an array is present and the BIOS or driver was
loaded. POST continues..
 
I was finally able to format the drive without any complications. I
left out the first step which was setting up the drive as RAID using
FastBuild. The option to access it becomes available for a few seconds
during boot up by hitting CTRL+F6 (I think). I saw my drive listed in
the utility, was able to set it up as ARRAY1. Then it was simply a
matter of booting in DOS, setting up the main partition in FDisk, and
then formatting.

~Avery
 
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