How to instal SATA Drive??

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My View

I have an Asus P4S8X motherboard (about 3 years old) with 2 SATA
connections.

I currently have installed a primary IDE 200GB harddrive (with Windows XP
Pro SP2 installed) and a secondary IDE 80GB HD that acts as a backup drive.

I have bought a 200GB SATA drive that I now want to instal as a second
backup drive.

When I plug in the SATA it is not recognised by the BIOS ie there appears to
be no plug 'n play setup with this drive and the BIOS does not show it
listed, as far as I can see. I have read about these drives being installed
as a single RAID 0 and working that way, but I don't know how to do that.

Any ideas how I can get this drive installed?

thanks

PeterH
 
My View said:
I have an Asus P4S8X motherboard (about 3 years old) with 2 SATA
connections.

I currently have installed a primary IDE 200GB harddrive (with Windows XP
Pro SP2 installed) and a secondary IDE 80GB HD that acts as a backup
drive.

I have bought a 200GB SATA drive that I now want to instal as a second
backup drive.

When I plug in the SATA it is not recognised by the BIOS ie there appears
to be no plug 'n play setup with this drive and the BIOS does not show it
listed, as far as I can see. I have read about these drives being
installed as a single RAID 0 and working that way, but I don't know how to
do that.

Any ideas how I can get this drive installed?

thanks

PeterH
Click to expand...


this any help

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/sata_install_tshoot.html
 
You need to repair your win installation, using the F6 option to install
sata/raid drivers from floppy. Even if you do not intend to use raid
The drivers are supplied by your mobo manu.
 
Please do not post wrong information and horribly wrong advice. The OP said
the BIOS does not recognize the drive. BIOS comes into play well before any
operating system comes into play

steve
 
I happen to have a P4S8X with dual SATA drives, but no IDE drives.

Initially the SATA drives were not recognized by the BIOS.

Towards the back of the motherboard manual is a page about the "RAID"
controller. At first I ignored that, since I did not want to link the disks
togther. But, eventually I got the idea that I had to do something with the
RAID controller. That was the key to success.

Specifically, pay close attention to the message during the POST about
hitting CTRL-F to enter the FastBuild controller setup. Do that. In my
case I formed two arrays of one disk each. You will need to form one array
with one disk, the new SATA disk. Be careful not to form a mirror array
involing one of your IDE disks and the SATA disk. As I recall the default
options were for mirror or stripe, but I had to use the custom/advanced
options to make the array contain just one disk.

Once you think that you have made the array correctly, reboot and watch the
POST. After some info about the IDE disks (same as before), you should see
a clear statement about the single-disk array you just created. This should
appear just before the message to hit CTRL-F to enter the FastBuild utility
(raid controller setup).

Once the BIOS can see the drive, you will need to provide XP a driver to
also see it. If this was a clean install and if XP were going to be
installed on the SATA drive, you would need to hit F6 early in the
installation and provide the driver on a floppy. Ditto if you were
"cloning" the IDE drive to the SATA drive, then wanting to boot XP from it.
The latter is where a repair installation would be necessary.

However, I assume you do NOT want to do either of these. You just want the
new hard drive to be available for data storage? For that you should be
able to install the driver from the XP desktop level, pretty much like any
other driver that is not required to boot the PC into XP. The following is
from a TXT file hat came with the drivers, found in the "winxp" directory
under the main driver directory:

1. Go to Windows [Start] [Control Panel], select [Switch to Classic View].

Then a [System] icon appears.

2. Double click [System] icon, select [Hardware] [Device Manager],

choose "RAID controllers" from the device list, click [Reinstall Driver].

3. Check "Install from a list or specific location", then specify the file
path where the

driver is, e.g. X:\Drivers\Promise\WINXP. Click [Next],.

4. The Windows XP Setup screen will appear again saying

"Setup will load support for the following mass storage devices

-WinXP Promise FastTrak 376 (tm) controller". The FastTrak 376 driver

will now be copied on to the system and entered into the Windows XP driver
database.

then click [Finish]

5. Finally, Windows XP will restart your computer.

6. Follow the instructions to complete the installation.
 
My View said:
I have an Asus P4S8X motherboard (about 3 years old) with 2 SATA
connections.

I currently have installed a primary IDE 200GB harddrive (with Windows XP
Pro SP2 installed) and a secondary IDE 80GB HD that acts as a backup
drive.

I have bought a 200GB SATA drive that I now want to instal as a second
backup drive.

When I plug in the SATA it is not recognised by the BIOS ie there appears
to be no plug 'n play setup with this drive and the BIOS does not show it
listed, as far as I can see. I have read about these drives being
installed as a single RAID 0 and working that way, but I don't know how to
do that.

Any ideas how I can get this drive installed?
Click to expand...

First read the motherboard manual. If you don't have a manual download it
from www.asus.com This motherboard will not support a slave drive on the
primary IDE controller if you are using SATA drives. You'll have to remove
the 80 GB drive. It also may not support a single SATA drive. The manual is
not clear about this. Asuming that it does support one SATA drive and you
have removed the 80 GB drive proceed as follows:

In the BIOS under Advanced make sure "Onboard ATA device" is enabled and
"Onboard ATA device first" is disabled. Boot to Windows. Look in the device
manager to see if the Promise controller is showing up. If the contoller
shows up but has a exclamation mark then you need to load the driver for it.
You can download the latest driver from ASUS's web site or try the one on
the CD that came with the motherboard. Once the controller is showing up and
working properly run the disk management snap in (Start ==> Run ==>
diskmgmt.msc) and see if the drive shows up. If it does you can partition
and format it here.

It is possible you need a BIOS upgrade. The latest BIOS is 1005. It includes
a Promise contoller update. Note the drive will not show up on the first
screen in the BIOS. That is for PATA drives only. If you go into the RAID
setup you should see the drive there. Press (Ctrl-F) on startup.

Kerry
 
Thank-you all for great feedback.

Kerry, your advice was excellent however now I have another problem.

I have set-up the harddrives and updated BIOS as you advised ie updated to
BIOS 1005, enabled and disabled ATA as suggested and I also set the SATA
First option (or whatever) to disabled so that the SATA would not become the
bootup drive, and I removed 80GB. So I now have the 200GB IDE as the primary
IDE master and the SATA on the primary SATA connection.

I have set the SATA to a single RAID 0 (ie 1+0 Stripe). I bootup and the
BIOS sees the IDE and SATA drives and the PC opens all the way through to
the desktop like normal BUT then I still get the hour glass as (I presume)
the SATA is doing something (I can still hear one of the drives operating).
I then see a little brown icon appear in the taskbar (this appeared when I
was setting up the SATA in the first place and the PC recognised a new
hardware device etc etc). As soon as this happens I get the BSOD saying
"IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and Stop: 0X000000A, etc etc).

Since updating to SP2 recently I have been getting this same BSOD when I
remove a USB memory device or remove a USB card reader. After searching the
net for similar problems this appears to be a fault with a number of users.
Now it happens when the SATA starts up.

I also tried turning off the USB 2.0 function in BIOS but this made no
difference.

I checked the Event Viewer and I get the following disk error message: "The
device, \Device\Harddisk2\D, is not ready for access yet".

any clues??

regards

PeterH
 
My View said:
Thank-you all for great feedback.

Kerry, your advice was excellent however now I have another problem.

I have set-up the harddrives and updated BIOS as you advised ie updated to
BIOS 1005, enabled and disabled ATA as suggested and I also set the SATA
First option (or whatever) to disabled so that the SATA would not become
the bootup drive, and I removed 80GB. So I now have the 200GB IDE as the
primary IDE master and the SATA on the primary SATA connection.

I have set the SATA to a single RAID 0 (ie 1+0 Stripe). I bootup and the
BIOS sees the IDE and SATA drives and the PC opens all the way through to
the desktop like normal BUT then I still get the hour glass as (I presume)
the SATA is doing something (I can still hear one of the drives
operating). I then see a little brown icon appear in the taskbar (this
appeared when I was setting up the SATA in the first place and the PC
recognised a new hardware device etc etc). As soon as this happens I get
the BSOD saying "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and Stop: 0X000000A, etc etc).

Since updating to SP2 recently I have been getting this same BSOD when I
remove a USB memory device or remove a USB card reader. After searching
the net for similar problems this appears to be a fault with a number of
users. Now it happens when the SATA starts up.

I also tried turning off the USB 2.0 function in BIOS but this made no
difference.

I checked the Event Viewer and I get the following disk error message:
"The device, \Device\Harddisk2\D, is not ready for access yet".

any clues??
Click to expand...

That sounds like a driver problem. Try running the manufacturer's diagnostic
for the new drive. If you didn't get a CD or floppy with the new drive you
can download it from the manufacturer's web site. If it passes the
diagnostic then you know the motherboard and drive are working properly and
can start troubleshoting Windows. Let us know how you make out. I am not
sure that you need to set up the drive as a RAID 0 but leave that for now.

Kerry
 
Hi Kerry

How can I run the diagnostic software if the drive causes a BSOD ie I can't
get far enough to open any software.
 
My View said:
Hi Kerry

How can I run the diagnostic software if the drive causes a BSOD ie I
can't get far enough to open any software.
Click to expand...

The diagnostic software is on a bootable CD or floppy. It doesn't need
Windows.

Kerry
 
Sorry for the delay in getting back but finally did a diagnostic on the SATA
drive.
The diagnostic didn't run completely.
I connected the SATA only and selected the Quick Test.
It came up with the following error message immediately:
"....reported a smart error.
Warning! One ore more current or worst-case attributes are below threshold.
....system must restart.... turn power off"

Is there any way of reformatting this drive at initial start-up?

Also there is a bit more history to this drive that I haven't mentioned to
date as I do not think it is relevant to this problem.
The SATA drive was installed initially and Windows installed on it. I then
had some problems with it (can't remember what), but enough to get the IDE
replacement and start again. Because I now have the SATA sitting around
doing nothing I now want to try and add it to the system as a backup drive.

When I have the SATA drive only (ie no IDEs connected) it does get as far as
the Windows XP start-up screen and then thinks a while and then does a
Windows restart (blue screen) and commences the Windows XP install
procedure.

One other thing, I also carried out a Memtest86 test but didn't find any
problems, although it did seem to restart the test after finishing.

Peter
 
Just checked the Western Digital website and the diagnostics usually asks to
restart if it detects Windows XP installed on the disk being diagnosed.
I will now try their suggestion of entering the recovery console and running
chkdsk /r and/or fixmbr (that fixes the master boot record.
May need a boot disk but I believe the boot.ini details are different for a
SATA drive compared to an IDE drive.

Will try this tomorrow.
 
My View said:
Just checked the Western Digital website and the diagnostics usually asks
to restart if it detects Windows XP installed on the disk being diagnosed.
I will now try their suggestion of entering the recovery console and
running chkdsk /r and/or fixmbr (that fixes the master boot record.
May need a boot disk but I believe the boot.ini details are different for
a SATA drive compared to an IDE drive.

Will try this tomorrow.
Click to expand...

With the WD Datalifeguard tools you should be able to clear out all the
existing partitions on the drive. I don't sell WD drives so I haven't used
Datalifeguard for a while and can't remember how it works. You may have to
do what they call a low level format. You need to clear track zero somehow
before proceeding. Note this will erase everything that is on the drive.
Once this is done run the diagnostics. Do not use the Windows version. You
need the DOS version to make sure the Windows drivers are out of the
picture. Make sure the SATA drive is the only drive hooked up when you do
this. Make sure your other drive is completely disconnected. If it still
won't complete it sounds like you have a bad drive.

Kerry
 
Looks like a bad drive - I'll be taking it back tomorrow. Probably go for an
IDE this time.
Thanks for your help anyway.
 
My View said:
Looks like a bad drive - I'll be taking it back tomorrow. Probably go for
an IDE this time.
Thanks for your help anyway.
Click to expand...

Too bad, at least it's still on warranty.

Kerry
 
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