Setting up an S-ATA drive - help needed!

Karl Hungus

Right, I've just got my S-ATA Raptor 36gig today, and I've stuck it in the machine, and have all the connectors in the right place, but I just can't seem to get any drivers working!?

I tried to load the drivers through the windows setup, and went to install a 3rd part SCSI or RAID driver, and it kept saying that the drivers on the floppy that came with the motherboard, were causing errors. I went and downloaded the VIA drivers from the MSI website, and it keeps saying "Sorry, the setup wizard cannot find the supported hardware in your system. You should check your hardware and try again."

I've got an MSI KT4-Ultra motherboard, and it has onboard S-ATA RAID support. I'm running windows XP. I've also got 2 IDE harddrives, which shouldn't make any difference really...?

Does anyone know WTF is up here?

Any help appreciated greatly!

jozi

all i know is that when i got my sata drive i had a load of probs getting the drive to reconise in my computer

thats ages ago so i cant remember how i got it to work

not much help is it?
maybe this is:

check you mobo manual and see is there a jumper for sata that you might need to enable, i had to on my mobo.
and make sure you have the latest drivers installed, thats all i can think of to be honest

best of luck anyway, keep us posted on your progres

jozi

Karl Hungus

No, there's nothing about any jumpers in the Motherboard manual or the Serial ATA RAID manual.

jozi

i don't now

surelly there's someone here on boards who might know

Try posting here: AMD forum i got loads of help here before i found out about boards. as far as i know there's an abit forum do a search there and see what you get

jozi

neokenzo

Does your mobo has a promise driver? I think VIARAID are meant for SATA only and do not mix with IDE. You need a to load it through VIAPROMISE. I could be wrong, if so somebody will correct me.

Karl Hungus

Originally posted by neokenzo
Does your mobo has a promise driver? I think VIARAID are meant for SATA only and do not mix with IDE. You need a to load it through VIAPROMISE. I could be wrong, if so somebody will correct me.

No, I dont think I've any promise drivers.

I'll do a search to see if I can download the promise drivers so, and see what goes on.

Thanks.

Karl Hungus

I've found stuff here, but can anyone tell me what drivers I need?

I've really no clue tbh.

Dempsey

Get the manual and look up the SATA section. Im sure there is something to be enabled in the BIOS to get the SATA going. I had trouble like you but on a Intel platform. The answer is in the manual.

Stephen

Ensure that the SATA controller is enabled in your bios.

Karl Hungus

Originally posted by Dempsey
Get the manual and look up the SATA section. Im sure there is something to be enabled in the BIOS to get the SATA going. I had trouble like you but on a Intel platform. The answer is in the manual.

There's nothing in the manual, and there's nothing in the BIOS.

BUT!!!!

What I have found, is the Promise SATA drivers on the MSI CD... I just don't know how to install them...? They're there under the IDE folder, but there's no install file, and there's no install link on the autorun setup. Any ideas people?

Now, in case I'm missing something in the BIOS, where do find the SATA settings?

Karl Hungus

RIGHT!

I found something I had overlooked in the BIOS, and enabled the SATA RAID! YA!

But now what...?

Device Manager is simply reading it as a SCSI Disk Device, and it doesn't show up in disk management. The little HDD Icon has a yellow Exclamation Mark over it, what's this mean???

Sorry if I'm being a complete mongtard here, but this is the first time I've used an SATA drive, and it's just frying my head!!!

Edit:

I didn't see this bit here, it says that: "This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device." DAMINT!?!

CombatCow

i know sweet fa bout sata hdd's but i heard that drivers for the sata drives have to be installed before you install windows,tho in ur case you just want to add the raptor drive.Maybe the promise drivers have to be put on a floppy and installed during a boot up? dunno good luck tho.


CombatCow

Karl Hungus

Originally posted by Combatcow
i know sweet fa bout sata hdd's but i heard that drivers for the sata drives have to be installed before you install windows,tho in ur case you just want to add the raptor drive.Maybe the promise drivers have to be put on a floppy and installed during a boot up? dunno good luck tho.


CombatCow

Yeah, ok... I'll just try and use the SATA driver floppy again during boot up.

jozi

thats right it will show up as a scsi drive, click the little yellow exclamation mark and then install drivers see what happens

try extracting the file you found on the cd to your hd if its a zip file or what ever and point the instalation for the driver instal to that folder

jozi

EDIT you can add the drivers for sata after a windows install, thats the way i had to do it as i don't have a floppy disk drive in my pc

BoB_BoT

first off, place the s-ata drivers on a floppy disk.

go to your bios, set it too boot for scsi or s-ata (if it has the option for s-ata)

remove your ide hard disks just so windows has nothing else to install to.

start to install windows, choose to install a 3rd party device driver etc...

when it asks for drivers pop in your floppy disk and choose the one that suits you, more than likely it will have an xp driver or 2k driver. If there's more than one option as in 2 different xp drivers and one of them is a promise driver choose that. If that fails to work try the other driver.

Can't hurt to try The drivers you have on your cd should do the job, and if windows gives you error messages but a continue button, go with it
Certified my ass! Nobody cares windows!! hehe

Good Luck Man ,
Rob

Karl Hungus

Right, I think I know what's going on... I tried installing with the floppy, and it keeps saying about unexpected errors.

But in enabling the SATA, it keeps trying to boot it up as a RAID array. All the drivers actually do seem to be there, as I can get into a nice little RAID setup screen after booting. The device itself is being detected, and all is well with it, it seems.

So, I guess the question now, is how do I get to read it as a normal drive? As I want to format it, nice and neat, and run programs of it!

jozi

That little menu you get after bot is it kind of like your bios in the way that it looks??? you only need to be in there if your going to run a raid setup ie 2 sata hd's

i'm not sure but i think you only have 1 hd so you can ignore that.


does the hd not show up in my computer? if so format it and it's ready for use

all i can think of i'm afraid, heads not to well best go to bed see how you get on and keep posting with as much info as posible must be someone who can help you out

jozi

Karl Hungus

Originally posted by jozi
does the hd not show up in my computer? if so format it and it's ready for use

No, it doesn't show up in my computer, or disk management (Where it would need to be if I wanted to format it) so no luck really.

jozi

hmm i dont know


anyone else know!!!

jozi

(bed now)

Dempsey

Originally posted by Karl Hungus
Device Manager is simply reading it as a SCSI Disk Device, and it doesn't show up in disk management. The little HDD Icon has a yellow Exclamation Mark over it, what's this mean???

Install the drivers on the floppy for this fella. Then Format the Raptor.

unkel

I think you're confusing two things here. You have only 1 SATA drive, so you don't want RAID

In BIOS enable SATA, but not RAID

No need for floppies with drivers during XP install

Karl Hungus

Originally posted by unkel
I think you're confusing two things here. You have only 1 SATA drive, so you don't want RAID

In BIOS enable SATA, but not RAID

I double checked the BIOS to make sure I didn't overlook anything (Again...) but there's only the choice to enable or disable the "Serial ATA Controller"...

BoB_BoT

actually I remember with my msi mainboard i had to tell it what the s-ata drive was doing before it would work. so i had to go into the raid menu and set it as a strip drive (iirc). You may have to do the same for it to work. It's only a guess, but you never know. I'll do a reboot and see what it's set as.

unkel, I installed xp pro on my s-ata drive and it didn't have the drivers, would only accept it from a floppy disk :P.

Karl Hungus

Originally posted by BoB_BoT
actually I remember with my msi mainboard i had to tell it what the s-ata drive was doing before it would work. so i had to go into the raid menu and set it as a strip drive (iirc). You may have to do the same for it to work. It's only a guess, but you never know. I'll do a reboot and see what it's set as.

Ok, thanks bob...
I'll give that a go, and get back to you in a minute.

BoB_BoT

woops, it wasn't strip, it was stripe
and yeap, i remember i had to set it up in the raid bios before it would work
So in your raid bios menu choose the option define raid/array etc.. and try and set you drive to stripe

gl

Karl Hungus

Ah, danke danke, Bob! Worked a charm!

Currently formatting it, and should have it up and running as a fully functional drive sharpish. The RAID bios was very fiddley indeed, and I had already gone through it, but I figured out how to set up an array properly. Now it's just running as a single-drive array.

BIG ****ING THANKS TO ALL WHO HELPED OUT HERE!!!

Creamy Goodness

well done karl

hope you have good times with your raptor

/me strokes his 36gig raptor.

Karl Hungus

Originally posted by Cr3m0
well done karl

hope you have good times with your raptor

/me strokes his 36gig raptor.

Aye, after this head**** of a time installing it, I'm damn well gonna enjoy the pantaloon out of it!!!:D

unkel

BoB_BoT, I installed xp on new SATA RAID0, so I did need the RAID drivers (for the onboard raid chip), but not SATA drivers for my AI7. Obviously different mobo's = different courses of action

Karl, best of luck with your ueber IDE drive. When are you buying another one for RAID0? :cool:

Karl Hungus

Right, now...

How do I install windows on the Raptor now?
I don't seem to be able to from boot installation, is there any trick to it now?

Dempsey

Take out the other drive with the os. It will have no choice but to let ya do the install. Is XP the current OS?

Karl Hungus

I actually tried that, and it wasn't able to recognise the drive.
And yes, XP is the OS.

Dempsey

When ya remove the current OS drive you'll need to load the RAID & SCSI drivers (that floppy disk ya have) and then the drive will be recognised.

The OS on the other drive might cause a headache. If ya dont have valuable info on it, format that too. Have it as storage

Karl Hungus

Fair enough so, I'll try and give that a whirl later on.

I just did a fresh install last night, so there's nothing too important here atm.

Karl Hungus

AHKK!

Trying to install the RAID drivers in the windows boot is just giving me the same old error message again.

I'm figuring I've got to create a new boot disk for them, as this one here doesn't seem to be of ANY help at all. :dunno:

So, how should I go about doing this???

Dempsey

What exactly are the error messages. Google the driver names on the disk. Should be able to download them

Karl Hungus

I can't access the disk, it keeps saying it's not formatted.

Edit: The SATA RAID manual says it's FastTrack 376, but I can't really find out much about making a boot disk for it from google.

BoB_BoT

just wondering if you've tried these drivers for the s-ata yet?

even if it's saying disk not formatted can you get to the command prompt (repair console) to format it?

Karl Hungus

OMFG YES FINALLY!!!

Yes, I'm working from my new install on my little 6 gig partition on the raptor drive!!! YEEE-HAAAW! After nearly bashing my head off the keyboard 50 times, I finally made a working boot disk with the proper drivers, and IT WORKED!!!

Christ, I can't tell you how relieved I am.
And something else, it was the FASTEST fecking install I ever did so far!
WHOOSH, tbh!

Well, I've got my drive up and humping, and my OS running off it!
Finally, I think the headaches are over, and I've got an actually WORKING boot disk!

Anyway, thanks for all the freakin' help on this thread.
I'm a mongtard of a newbie no longer! :dunno:

Dempsey

Why bother partitioning a raptor?

Some speed of them, aint they:D whoooosh

Karl Hungus

It's only a small partition for windows, graphics/audio drivers, and a few other programs. The main partition then is to be used for most of the other programs, and games and such. Noisy little ****er, tho!