Vista Cannot find hard drive

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Guest

I am trying to install Vista Ultimate on my current XP Pro machine. I plan
on doing a clean install. As I proceed through the installation process I
get to the section where I select a hard drive to install Vista too from the
list found. However nothing is found. The motherboard is an Iwill P4-HT
that contains onboard Promise Technologies RAID, I dont use the raid but use
for the extra IDE ports and the increased ATA 133 speed. I tried browsing
for device drivers which I found on Promise's website but even after the
drivers are installed it still does not find the hard drives sitting on the
Promise Raid IDE ports.

What can I do? I was going to try to put the Primary HD on the main IDE
(non -promise IDE port) to see if Vista would recognize it, still install the
needed Promise drivers, install vista, and once installation is complete try
to put the HD back on the Promise ATA 133 IDE ports in hopes it would
recognize it. But I wanted to check to see if that is a viable solution
before proceeding.

Thanks.
 
Make sure you have the correct drivers for the Vista version you are
installing 32 or 64 bit. I have never had any luck moving a drive from the
MOBO controller to a Promise controller, and they advise to copy the data
(system) onto a drive after installing on their card. You would have to
install it on your MOBO, then back it up, move the drive to the Promise card
and they reload it. You would have to install the drivers while connected
to the MOBO. You should not have to do this as you should be able to supply
the drivers when you get to the point where you select the drive, that is
where you supply the drivers for the card.
 
Hi John,

Promise does not have a specific driver for 32 vs. 64, they only show one
driver for Vista: Ultra 133 TX2 52.09KB v2.1.0.3 Windows 2007/4/24

Once I select the desired driver, it accesses the floppy drive and the
status bar in the Vista Installation grows as though it downloaded the
necessary information. But when I select to refresh it still does not list
the drives on those IDE ports.
 
I would try contacting Promise support as they were always responsive for me
and their solutions worked, though I don't remember how long it took as I
haven't used one of those cards in over 5 years. Until you get Vista to see
that card, you will not be able to even copy Vista to the drive and have it
work, so you are stuck using the MOBO IDE until you get that resolved with
Promise. If you have to start replacing anything, consider moving to SATA
as that is what will be most useful when you move forward to newer
equipment. There wasn't much difference between the 100 and 133 anyway
except for many small reads. Also, your PCI bus might not even support the
higher speeds.
 
The promise 133 cards blow, 2 hard drives both started writing corrupted
data on 3 different cards. Moved back to the motherboard and it was fine.
 
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