Stuart Palmer said:
Hi, I hope someone can help:
I have an ASUS P4b533-E motherboard and I have recently purchased a Serial
Ata drive and adpater, on bootup the Serial Adapter Bios does not run
(which
I believe should occur similar to a SCSI adapter) I am hoping someon can
tell me if I need to alter anything in the BIOS). I believe the chipset on
the adapter is a VIA VT6421 though I cannot find any manufacturer marking
on
it. I flashed my system BIOS to 1014 with no success.
The adapter looks like the one on ebay -
http://image.ebuyer.com/UK/P0066755_C0000035_P0000000.jpg if that helps at
all.
When gettng to the stage of installing the OS, the drive is not detected
(I
assume this is because my system bios does not recognise my sata adapter.)
Many thx for any help you can offer
Stuart Palmer
Having followed your thread in alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus I can verify
that there's allot of good info in there with regards to what you need to
check. I'm going to paste a comment you made from there to here for
simplicity - you wrote "From a conv I have had with a friend, usually the
Sata adapter has an onboard BIOS and that initiates after the system bios,
but he suggested that I may have to mess about with the BIOS, I set my
primary Boot item as
'Other/onboard boot device' but still my new HDD isn't detected" . Your
friends advice is correct, what extra options is your motherboards BIOS
setup displaying when you go in there to change the boot order? Apart from
other/onboard boot device, what other options are listed or selectable? This
is important because if you haven't selected the right boot device that
would be one reason why you're not getting anything displayed in relation to
the card at POST (Power On Self Test) time. Normally add in bootable
cards/controllers will add extra functions to the boot process after POST
but before the OS starts loading This will be obvious as you watch the
machine post and with HDD Controllers (especially RAID Controllers) there's
often additional options displayed/provided while they're initialising e.g.
my RAID controller flashes up a message which says (among other things) to
press alt + 3 to enter its setup routine.
If there is no appropriate entry in your motherboard BIOS to boot from your
SATA Controller card then, as previously mentioned by other posters) in the
other thread it may be due to your SATA Controller card being non-bootable
in that it doesn't provide the required BIOS "hook" to support booting from
an attached drive. The other (less likely) possibility is that your
motherboards BIOS doesn't have enough space left to load the SATA Controller
cards BIOS - this would only really apply though if you have additional
bootable devices attempting to load when your PC is switched on. These
things are commonly network cards, SCSI Controller cards and even multiple
VGA/Graphics cards.
If you can provide the exact make and model of the card (or the exact
webpage from the supplier listing its specs - not just the chips used) that
would help to determine if it is a bootable card. In case you're wondering,
non-bootable cards are still usable in that they are initialised through
drivers loading for them as the OS loads. This means that they can still
perform their functions within windows (just not while windows is initially
loading). Given this, a non-bootable SATA Controller card could still be
useful for a secondary HDD controller (i.e. not the one that the OS is
installed on).
I think the first step is to ensure your SATA Controller card, if bootable,
is being recognised and displaying any applicable menus at boot and to do
that I need to know what your motherboards bios lists as possible bootable
devices - all of them?
Paul
