P4PE Not Recognizing SATA Drive

[Ray Woodcock]

I have an ASUS P4PE. I am attempting, without success, to make a
Seagate SATA drive work with it. The drive is new and is properly
cabled, both power and data.

I have four other drives in the computer: three hard drives and a
CD-RW. All are regular old IDE/ATA drives. Am I limited to a
maximum of four devices?

I would upgrade the Promise BIOS, but I cannot figure out which BIOS I
want. It appears the 376 BIOS (which I think applies here) is the
same as the TX4000?

I'm not sure what difference upgrading the Promise BIOS would make. I
have flashed the motherboard BIOS. On a DOS boot, FDISK still does
not recognize the drive.

Seagate's SeaTools Desktop Diagnostic does not find any sign of a SATA
drive in this computer.

 

[Tim]

Ray,

Firstly I do not have the motherboard you mention.

I quick check of the asus site reveals the driver for a Promise 376, so your
assumptions about this chip would appear correct.

http://www.asus.com.tw/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=P4PE&Type=Latest
(bottom of page)

The latest bios is also available there - if yours is prior to v1007 then an
update may be in order.

According to the manual, page 4-26 shows how in BIOS Setup the Advanced PCI
Config section you can enable or disable the SATA controller. This is the
first thing I would check. If you are not getting a 2nd POST style screen
from the Promise controller then this will be the cause.

On page 5-24 of the manual the details of the Promise Raid controller are
covered. Check that you do not have anything connected to the IDE RAID
connector.

The manual does not indicate that you can have a Single SATA disc drive
connected since RAID 0 and 1 both require 2 discs - many controllers do
allow this, but a bios update may be needed if you still are not on the most
recent version.

Some RAID controllers allow you to create stripe configs (or mirror) of 1
disc only. So have a play around in the Promise RAID BIOS. Some of these
RAID BIOS will not show up unless they first detect 2 drives...

HTH
- Tim

 

[Courseyauto]

Even if you are not going to use the SATA controller as raid you still have to
install the raid driver at the beginnig of the OS install. I am assuming you
using XP,hit F6 when asked and have the raid driver installed on a floppy. I
will not recognize the SATA drive unless you hit F6. DOUG

 

[Ray Woodcock]

Even if you are not going to use the SATA controller as raid you still have to
install the raid driver at the beginnig of the OS install. I am assuming you
using XP,hit F6 when asked and have the raid driver installed on a floppy. I
will not recognize the SATA drive unless you hit F6. DOUG

Thanks, guys. I did indeed have to play around with the Raid setup. It works now.