winxp install still can't see sata drives

DamoKen

Hi, I posted a thread on Saturday (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=191282) concerning a windows xp install on a newly built system where the hard drives are SATA drives. Cheers for all the helpful responses to that one, I did as suggested and bought a floppy drive this morning, copied ASUS's latest SATA378 drivers from their site onto a floppy disk, and when prompted during the install put the disk in. Windows setup was able to read the floppy ok, asking me to select which Promise controller drivers I wanted. I selected the option for winxp, it loaded these and then continued setting up for the install. I then select the option to do a full install and again am told Windows can't find any hard drives, check my connections etc. The drives seem to be fine, they show up in the bios, windows still doesn't seem to be able to recognise them though. Is there anything else I need to do, or does anyone know what the problem might be?

Cheers

Damo

Optikus

Have you got the latest BIOS installed... and as i said in the last post i heard that older versions of xp dont support SATA, so make sure you are updated.

StRiKeR

can you tell me which model controller you have exactly? does the controller have the option to switch between RAID and Non RAID mode? have you try a newer driver update if theres any and maybe a bios update also!

DamoKen

StRiKeR wrote:

can you tell me which model controller you have exactly? does the controller have the option to switch between RAID and Non RAID mode? have you try a newer driver update if theres any and maybe a bios update also!

Hi, as far as I can tell there's a Promise SATA378 controller & a Promise SATA378 FastTrack controller, it maybe one and the same, the manual doesn't really go into much detail on it. From what I've read the fasttrack is if you do a raid setup, (at least if you set up in raid mode in Onboard configurations when you save and reboot it complains that there's no drive attached to the fasttrack controller). Here's where I'm confused though, I just want to set up without raid, now in the manual on the mobo disk it says "The SATA 378 Controller supports up to two Serial ATA hard drives and two Parallel ATA hard drives." . Ok thats fine, but below it where it mentions loading the drivers, it states the following "the following are driver installation procedures for the Windows operating systems that support the Promise SATA150 TX Series Controller. The SATA150 TX Series software drivers for Windows are included on the driver diskette."

Whats the sata150 tx series? One minute it talks about the sata 378 controllers and then without prior mention it's sata 150. The options for selecting the drivers are all 150 series drivers as well, though on the drivers page for the av8 on the asus site all I saw and downloaded were drivers for the 378 controller which by the way were an earlier version than the one I found on the mobo cd. As to what bios version I have I think I've the latest, though I'm not quite sure as the version number on the website for the latest bios is a totally different format from what I saw under System Information in the bios on my machine. i.e on the site it's A8V1006 and under System info on my machine it's 08.00.09 .

As to having the option of selecting raid mode or otherwise, yes, in the onboard configuration under the Onboard Promise Controller you can set to Raid mode or Ide mode.

Someone did mention to me earlier that you may need to format the drives before windows will see them as well as load the drivers, didn't see nay mention of that anywhere though.

Any ideas as always appreciated.

Cheers

mjn

the manual more than likely covers more than one motherboard model.

Easiest way to discover which you have? Check on startup, it should say on the screen.

StRiKeR

ok try this, select in the bios use non raid mode and dont load the fast track driver as thats for raid right, load the other driver, if that doesnt work select raid mode, load the fast track driver, and see what happens, you dont have to format the driver before the installation can see the drive that make no sence, xp installation can format it! let me know how you get on I will take a look at your board spec and the manual for you.
what make and model is your board

StRiKeR

ok is it the A8V Deluxe you have?? as thats the only A8V I can see on Asus site, and if thats the one you have, there should be 4 sata connectors, I cant help you any further till I get the board model of ya! as 2 sata are on different controller than the others

DamoKen

StRiKeR wrote:

ok is it the A8V Deluxe you have?? as thats the only A8V I can see on Asus site, and if thats the one you have, there should be 4 sata connectors, I cant help you any further till I get the board model of ya! as 2 sata are on different controller than the others

Hi Striker, well finally got it working late last night. Decided one last try before leaving it for the night and did a search on the mobo disk for any makedisk utilities. Apart from the one I'd already used which created a driver disk for the Sata378 controller, also came up with the one for the fasttrak controller (used through the sata-raid connectors I think) and the via controller which I think is through the southbridge and I thought was just for sata/ide raid, it looks like it supports general sata as well though as that one did the trick when I loaded the driver disks for all 3 during the install. would've been nice if it was a bit clearer in the documentation which was a little vague and confusing but this is how you learn right?
One strange thing though, when it came to creating a winxp partition for the install, even though I could choose the raptor and allocate what I wanted the partition size to be, winxp refused to recognise it as a valid winxp partition and wouldn't go ahead and create the partition. But.., if I selected the barracuda drive first I could go ahead, create a partition and install no problem. On the reboot however I had to reload the sata controllers (maybe because the raptor is connected to sata1 on the mobo so it's primary?) . Anyway, this time around I could create a partition on the raptor drive and proceed with installing winxp there. The trouble is this comes up as drive D, not C which has already been allocated to the barracuda. A side affect of this I think maybe having to have the winxp cd in the cd drive each time I reboot otherwise I recieve a message telling me I need to insert a boot cd, is this because winxp only looks initially at the c drive on boot up?, thats all I can think of anyway.

Cheers for all the help by the way on the sata controllers, much appreciated.

StRiKeR

thats what i tho your problem was, before i looked at your mobo spec, i tho you only got 2 sata port, then i found out you have 4 ports, 2 on via and 2 on promise, if you really want to raptor to be c:, and not having to use the cd all the time when you boot, swap over the drives and leave the seagate disconnect, install xp on the raptor with a reformat, then let it boot into windows on its own, its easier when you leave the system simple, then add the second drive, and change the drive letter on it if it allocate the second drive after the cd! thats i have to do when I install mine, I've 6 hdds on 3 sets of raid 0 and i still have another 6 removable drives there so windows allocate them everywhere.. lol! i just change them myself!