In need of help regarding SATA drive

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Mojo

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 28, 2003
Messages
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Okay, here's my issue.

My system is as stated in my sig, except I just bought a 200GB Seagate SATA hard drive. I have it plugged in, the SATA cable is connected to my motherboard, and the power is connected to the PSU. I have tried to install the VIA Raid drivers, and anything else that seemed relevant to my SATA drive installation that appeared on the Asus K8V download page.

However, I have not been able to get my BIOS to detect the drive, and subsequently the drive has not appeared on the My Computer screen, or in device manager/disk information (when you right click my computer > manage). The drive doesn't appear to be damaged, it DOES spin up when I power it up.

Can anyone help me out here? I need some advice, I've never owned an SATA drive before and I've already tried searching google and such.
 
Is the SATA RAID controller enabled in the BIOS? You should see the drive listed at boot, I am not positive about this board but you may have set the drive up in the SATA BIOS. If so you will see the option to enter the setup for the SATA RAID during boot via a hot key.
 
I have two options enabled in my BIOS that looked most relevant to this...

OnChip SATA Boot Rom - ENABLED
OnBoard Promise Controller - ENABLED

I couldn't find anything else that seemed like it would help. Does anyone know what key I need to press?
 
Is this a boot drive or secondary drive? Is your boot drive an IDE drive? It normally won't show up in the IDE section of the BIOS, but it should show up in the boot settings section if you select it as a boot drive (where you set booting from CD or floppy etc).

BTW what mobo do you have?
 
jpinard said:
Is this a boot drive or secondary drive? Is your boot drive an IDE drive? It normally won't show up in the IDE section of the BIOS, but it should show up in the boot settings section if you select it as a boot drive (where you set booting from CD or floppy etc).

BTW what mobo do you have?
Click to expand...
This is a secondary hard drive, my main drive is a 80GB IDE drive, and obviously that one is my boot drive. I do'nt desire for the SATA drive to be a boot drive right now, I would just like to use it for storage now, I'm at university and don't have time for fixing things, some day this summer I will rearrange all my drives and make my SATA drive my boot device, however I just want it for storage for the time being. I am assuming that is easier anyways?

My motherboard is an Asus K8V.
 
Mojo said:
This is a secondary hard drive, my main drive is a 80GB IDE drive, and obviously that one is my boot drive. I do'nt desire for the SATA drive to be a boot drive right now, I would just like to use it for storage now, I'm at university and don't have time for fixing things, some day this summer I will rearrange all my drives and make my SATA drive my boot device, however I just want it for storage for the time being. I am assuming that is easier anyways?

My motherboard is an Asus K8V.
Click to expand...

I used to have a K8V a long time ago... but I don't remember the BIOS. Here's what you should do because I bet the HD is really being booted, but XP isn't seeing it.

Go to administration tools --> computer management --> storage --> disk management
and see if it shows up. Since it's not partitioned it won't show up in My Computer, until you partition and format it.
 
Oh... if it does show up there, then you can right click it and you'll have all your HD tools to utilize (partition and format it)
 
Yeah, it doesn't see it there either. It only sees my IDE hard drive and my iPod.

Is this a fault of the board? It has a crappy Via K8T800 chipset on it with a V8237 southbridge on it. I dunno what else to say about it.
 
Mojo said:
Yeah, it doesn't see it there either. It only sees my IDE hard drive and my iPod.

Is this a fault of the board? It has a crappy Via K8T800 chipset on it with a V8237 southbridge on it. I dunno what else to say about it.
Click to expand...

It could be a bad hard drive, or the mobo SATA controller. Plug it into each different SATA port, and see if it shows up. I'm sorry, I can't think of anything other options.
 
Yeah, I tried both ports on my motherboard.... SER_PRI and SER_SEC.


*sigh*.
 
i dont think you need the raid drivers if your using only one drive. but you might need sata drivers. did the drive come with a floppy?

and did you enable the sata channels in the bios?

mine had sata bios controller,

and channels listed seperately. i had to enable both and boot with the floppy in the drive, however i was setting up raid on my boot drives. and it was hell till i figured that out. had some more problems till 3rd partition time, then it worked like a charm.
 
rob2000 said:
i dont think you need the raid drivers if your using only one drive. but you might need sata drivers. did the drive come with a floppy?

and did you enable the sata channels in the bios?

mine had sata bios controller,

and channels listed seperately. i had to enable both and boot with the floppy in the drive, however i was setting up raid on my boot drives. and it was hell till i figured that out. had some more problems till 3rd partition time, then it worked like a charm.
Click to expand...

He doesn't need a floppy with SATA drivers since he's not installing windows. Win XP would still identify a new device and it would be present in device manager - even if the drivers went uninstalled.
 
So am I screwed or what? Do I need a new motherboard? I don't understand why it doesn't work, I mean the board is advertised as having SATA compatibility...
 
youve tried it with the 4 pin molex power connector? and the sata power connector if your psu has it? or a adapter? make sure you only have one power plug in, either the 4pin or the sata power. some people had issues go away when using the sata power instead.

try a different sata cable port on the mobo. not sure how many you have, prolly 2.

my mobo has 4 ports, and 4 individual channels, plus the controller.

i had to turn the controller on in bios
and turn on the channels individually.


its possible its a dead drive, but i would keep trying to be sure. make sure your cables are snug. also check the mobo jumpers, if you switched something, or possibly it requires a jumper switch to enable sata. i dunno. some boards are really weird.


still looking at your problem, is that drive a sata 2 drive? if so its possible it needs to be set to sata 1 speeds, via the drives jumper. this is for a different model via chipset. but it says it wont see the drive at post if its a late model drive on a first gen controller.

http://support.asus.com/faq/faq.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=K8V-X

hopefully its as simple as switching the jumper. let me know if that helped.
 
Okay.. update..

I updated my BIOS to version 1007 and the drive is now recognized and I formatted it as a Dynamic drive. However, now when I start up my computer it rests at the BIOS splash screen for about 2-3minutes (much longer than needed). Before, my computer used to start up in under a minute!

Does anyone know how I could dramatically reduce my startup time without messing uo my drive... I'm at school right now and I can't deal with my computer effing up I need this partition to last until May.
 
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