How to turn on RAID drivers in the bios?

  • Thread starter Thread starter David D
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David D

I am struggling to get a SATA drive as a boot HD on a new system. Is
there a name for it in the BIOS? IS it under RAID drivers or
something?
 
You need to install the drivers for the SATA chip and South bridge.
There should be a program on the CD that came with the drive called
something like "make driver disk". This will make a floppy.
When you install the new O/S at the start it will prompt you to press
F6 (?) to install third party RAID or SCSI drivers. Use this floppy to
load the drivers when instructed.
 
Done it and it still doesn't like it and won't work. I am hoping the
BIOS is the answer. It tells me the disk drivers are corrupt. Yeah,
right.
 
The answer depends on the motherboard, but here is what I had to do to get
SATA functioning on my ASUS P4S8X:

1. Tried to install XP directly, but it could not see my SATA drives.
Neither could the Seagate Disk preparation tools.
2. Re-read the motherboard manual and near the end found some notes about
configuring the RAID setup.
3. Used the "Fastrack RAID controller" setup option that appears briefly
near the end of the POST (power-on-test).
4. Made a RAID array. I choose to have a single disk, but I still had to
call it an "array" composed of one disk. That actually forced me into the
custom configuration, since RAID is usually striped (for speed) or mirrored
(for redundancy).
5. Once the RAID "array" was made I could "see" the disk with the Seagate
Tools CD. I chose to partition and format the drive using the SeaTools,
instead of using XP.
6. As a test, made one FAT32 partition and confirmed that a simple win98
(DOS) boot floppy could see it.
7. Tried to install XP, using F6, and get SATA drivers from the ASUS CD.
Failed, because XP does not support getting these drivers from a CD.
8. Copied the SATA drivers for winXP from the ASUS CD to a floppy. They
must be on a floppy for XP to see them.
9. I tried the F6 option during the XP installation and it never found the
drivers.
10. I went back and copied files called "txtsetup.oem" and "fasttx2k" from
the CD to the root of the floppy and placed the drivers in a directory
called "winxp". These files where in the part of the CD dealing with SATA
drivers and are apparently required. You may have similar, but differently
named, files.
11. This time the XP installer was able to use the F6 option to get the
drivers and about 45 minutes later XP was successfully installed.
 
It really depends on the motherboard and chipset..........Bob decribed one
way
On my system I needed to turn Raid on in the BIOS even if I was not using
RAID.Expanded the SATA drivers to a Floppy and pushed F6 during the XP
iinstallation which read the A drive and installed the drivers and then
continued with its installation.Once XP was installed I could turn off RAID
in the BIOS and all was well...I did not need to turn it off I was just
tired of having to wait for the RAID setup message.
Some chipsets come with 2 drivers for SATA......regular and RAID.

peter
 
David D said:
I am struggling to get a SATA drive as a boot HD on a new system. Is
there a name for it in the BIOS? IS it under RAID drivers or
something?
Click to expand...


If you are asking about an onboard SATA controller (that supports RAID)
then you need to enable the SATA controller in your BIOS. Where it is
depends on your BIOS brand and version. Could be buried several levels
deep, like under some peripheral management screen as some auxilliary
controller. The controller needs to be enabled (even if it looks like
you are enabling RAID) so the drive can be seen. Regardless of
installing drivers in the OS, the SATA drive won't be seen by any OS
unless the BIOS in the onboard controller is supporting its ports.
 
"A program on the cd that came with the unit to create drivers for the
floppy"
They got to be kidding,right........Thier are no RAID drivers in the
BIOS.You can
enable RAID,usually in advanced chipset,integrated peripherals (or similiar),
set to enhanced mode (or similiar),or "on chip Serial ATA",set for RAID,
set 1st boot device for RAID or "bootable add-in device" ,once set,after the
BIOS,press the proper keys to enter RAID configuration utility,create a set,
also have cdrom as 1st boot device with xp cd in it,boot to cd.Also,read the
owners manual...........
 
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