SATA drive not seen by XP on P4PE

[as mellow as a horse]

I've just bought a new Seagate 120gb SATA drive for my abit nforce2 board.
It works fine, but has disappointing performance, so I wondered how it would
work on a p4 system.

It just happens that I'm building a p4 system based around a second-user
p4pe board I picked up recently. The board works fine but came with no
drivers. I've downloaded and installed the intel chipset drivers from the
asus site, along with sound drivers and promise sata/raid controller
drivers. Everything seems to work great, BUT it doesn't see my SATA drive.

When I look under disk drives in device manager it shows the IDE disk I'm
booting off and " scsi drive" (or something similar, I'm working from
memory). I know the board sees the drive as it is shown before booting XP,
but I can't get XP to show any partitions.

Any ideas?

While I'm here, anyone know where I can get an IO shield/back-plate for (or
compatible with) the p4pe? It's one of those with the audio jacks arranged
vertically on the right hand side (most boards have the slots horizontally
laid out).

 

[Courseyauto]

It has to be formated for XP to see it from the operating system. DOUG

 

[as mellow as a horse]

It has to be formated for XP to see it from the operating system. DOUG

You misunderstood, Doug. I said it worked fine on my nforce2 board,
although to be fair I didn't say I was using XP on that too. There are two
partitions on the SATA drive, a 20gig NTFS one, and a 100gig-ish FAT32 one.
These are seen in XP on the nforce2, but nothing is shown on the p4pe using
XP. I've even used utils like Sisoft sandra to try and ID the disk, but
nothing is shown. The only weird thing is that I can't load Partition
Manager 7- it just gives some obscure error (forget what). PM7 Works ok on
my nforce2 board though.

And although I installed XP on the p4pe BEFORE the sata drivers, this wasn't
a problem on my nforce2 board.

 

[Courseyauto]

You misunderstood, Doug. I said it worked fine on my nforce2 board,
although to be fair I didn't say I was using XP on that too. There are two
partitions on the SATA drive, a 20gig NTFS one, and a 100gig-ish FAT32 one.
These are seen in XP on the nforce2, but nothing is shown on the p4pe using
XP. I've even used utils like Sisoft sandra to try and ID the disk, but
nothing is shown. The only weird thing is that I can't load Partition
Manager 7- it just gives some obscure error (forget what). PM7 Works ok on
my nforce2 board though.

And although I installed XP on the p4pe BEFORE the sata drivers, this wasn't
a problem on my nforce2 board.


XP needs the raid controller drivers on the ASUS INTEL board to be installed
at the time of XP indstallation when asked for SCSI drivers to press F6. You
dont set up a raid array but the SATA controller (whichever one you use )
needs a driver before it will recognize the SATA drive. You will more than
likely have to do a clean install on the ASUS board because it is a totaly
different chipset than the Nforce board. DOUG

 

[as mellow as a horse]

You misunderstood, Doug. I said it worked fine on my nforce2 board,
although to be fair I didn't say I was using XP on that too. There are two
partitions on the SATA drive, a 20gig NTFS one, and a 100gig-ish FAT32 one.
These are seen in XP on the nforce2, but nothing is shown on the p4pe using
XP. I've even used utils like Sisoft sandra to try and ID the disk, but
nothing is shown. The only weird thing is that I can't load Partition
Manager 7- it just gives some obscure error (forget what). PM7 Works ok on
my nforce2 board though.

And although I installed XP on the p4pe BEFORE the sata drivers, this wasn't
a problem on my nforce2 board.



XP needs the raid controller drivers on the ASUS INTEL board to be installed
at the time of XP indstallation when asked for SCSI drivers to press F6. You
dont set up a raid array but the SATA controller (whichever one you use )
needs a driver before it will recognize the SATA drive. You will more than
likely have to do a clean install on the ASUS board because it is a totaly
different chipset than the Nforce board. DOUG

Erm, sorry, but I should have said that the P4 board has it's OWN drive and
XP installation that I put on only the other day. Although I haven't
installed much else on there, I don't want to reinstall XP just to add SATA
drivers, especially when I didn't have to on my nforce board (which has IT'S
own drive just to clarify!).

 

[Courseyauto]

Erm, sorry, but I should have said that the P4 board has it's OWN drive and
XP installation that I put on only the other day. Although I haven't
installed much else on there, I don't want to reinstall XP just to add SATA
drivers, especially when I didn't have to on my nforce board (which has IT'S
own drive just to clarify!).


I asume your XP system is on an ATA drive,It will not see the SATA drive
unless it is formated. You can format it using the XP CD and stop
when the formating is complete,that is if the bios sees the SATA drive. You
might want to unplug your SYSTEM drive before you format the SATA drive so it
wont show up in the XP CD installation .
DOUG

 

[as mellow as a horse]

Erm, sorry, but I should have said that the P4 board has it's OWN drive and
XP installation that I put on only the other day. Although I haven't
installed much else on there, I don't want to reinstall XP just to add SATA
drivers, especially when I didn't have to on my nforce board (which has IT'S
own drive just to clarify!).



I asume your XP system is on an ATA drive,It will not see the SATA drive
unless it is formated. You can format it using the XP CD and stop
when the formating is complete,that is if the bios sees the SATA drive. You
might want to unplug your SYSTEM drive before you format the SATA drive so it
wont show up in the XP CD installation .
DOUG

The SATA drive IS formatted as I said in my 2nd post.

Sata Drive (120gb Seagate)
C: 20gigs, NTFS formatted, contains WinXP freshly installed for nforce2
board the other day
D: 100gigs, FAT32, contains nothing but a couple of drivers and things

ATA Drive (60gig Western digital) (used in p4pe machine)
C: 60gigs, NTFS, WinXP installed for p4pe last week, but prior to getting
SATA. Added SATA drivers yesterday.

ATA drive (60gig IBM deathstar) (was used in nforce2 until SATA bought)
C: 15gigs, NTFS, Winxp installed for nforce2 board some time ago. Added
SATA drivers the other day.
D: E: Both FAT32, just games and stuff

All mentions of XP refer to XP SP1.

If I boot the IBM ATA drive on my nforce2 board with the SATA connected, I
can see both partitions.

If I boot the WD drive on my p4pe system with the SATA attached, it does NOT
see the SATA partitions.

Hope that's clear now!

 

[Courseyauto]

What SATA controller is the SATA drive on that you are trying to see. It
sounds like the bios is not set up correctly. EXACTLY which model P4PE do you
have.

 

[as mellow as a horse]

What SATA controller is the SATA drive on that you are trying to see. It
sounds like the bios is not set up correctly. EXACTLY which model P4PE do you
have.

Erm, there's only one controller, but it's on the connector closest to the
edge.

As far as I recall the only bios option is enable/disable. I'll look and
see if I have an up-to-date bios tomorrow.

It's a 1.03 p4pe with sata and firewire. Can't tell anymore as it's not
hooked up.

 

[DaveW]

XP SP1 has the XP SATA driver.

 

[as mellow as a horse]

I'm using SP1. There are no exclaimation marks or anything indicating
anything wrong. And the raid/sata controller seems to be installed quite
nicely using the driver off the asus website. I guess the only thing to
change would be the scsi drive listed under disk drives in device manager.
On my nforce2 board it's listed as ST3120026AS SCSI Device (which
corresponds to the model of course) whereas on the p4pe, there is a drive as
well as the ata I'm booting off, but it's just listed (from memory) as "
SCSI drive" (yes, there is a gap). I tried playing with the option to update
the drivers, but XP couldn't find anything other than a "disk drive" driver.

 

[Scott]

Erm, there's only one controller, but it's on the connector closest to the
edge.

As far as I recall the only bios option is enable/disable. I'll look and
see if I have an up-to-date bios tomorrow.

It's a 1.03 p4pe with sata and firewire. Can't tell anymore as it's not
hooked up.

If you haven't run the MBFastBuild utility (part of the BIOS), then
that may be what's missing. Since you're now using the RAID
controller, the disk needs to be configured as a RAID device.
It should have prompted you to do this when it first booted, but
if you just used <ESC> to skip over it, I'm not sure if it will prompt
you again. If not, you should be able to use <Ctrl-F> to enter
the utility when booting.

The manual (which you can download from ASUS' site) warns
that you should back up the data before creating the RAID array.
I have a PATA drive hooked up to the RAID controller and I believe
that it preserved my existing data when I converted the drive to
an array (of 1...), but since the manufacturer warns you about
it, you might want to save any important data elsewhere.

If you want that drive to be your boot device, then you have to
change the boot order via the BOOT menu in the BIOS.

Good luck!

....Scott

 

[Milleron]

Erm, sorry, but I should have said that the P4 board has it's OWN drive and
XP installation that I put on only the other day. Although I haven't
installed much else on there, I don't want to reinstall XP just to add SATA
drivers, especially when I didn't have to on my nforce board (which has IT'S
own drive just to clarify!).



I asume your XP system is on an ATA drive,It will not see the SATA drive
unless it is formated. You can format it using the XP CD and stop
when the formating is complete,that is if the bios sees the SATA drive. You
might want to unplug your SYSTEM drive before you format the SATA drive so it
wont show up in the XP CD installation .
DOUG

This has been stated a few times, but it's not true. UNformatted
drives can be seen from within Windows. They must have a partition to
be seen, but that's all. UNformatted drives are actually formatted
from within Windows. His problem lies elsewhere.
Ron

 

[Tim]

I had exactly the same symptoms when I moved a RAID 1 disc (half of it) from
1 machine to another. I had to upgrade the drivers in the XP machine (a
gigabyte) to see the Asus disc volume. Thats not the whole story. I never
got to see the driver letters, partitions or the actual disc in Disk
Management. The disc had come from an SBS Server machine so I am suspecting
that the permissions on the disc were set prohibiting the Everyone group or
something like that.

I still have no idea why - my sole objective was to copy the partitions with
Drive Image, which worked, so the fact I never saw the drives in My Computer
never bothered me.

Is the Abit machine locked down quite well from a security perspective?

- Tim

 

[as mellow as a horse]

If you haven't run the MBFastBuild utility (part of the BIOS), then
that may be what's missing. Since you're now using the RAID
controller, the disk needs to be configured as a RAID device.
It should have prompted you to do this when it first booted, but
if you just used <ESC> to skip over it, I'm not sure if it will prompt
you again. If not, you should be able to use <Ctrl-F> to enter
the utility when booting.

The manual (which you can download from ASUS' site) warns
that you should back up the data before creating the RAID array.
I have a PATA drive hooked up to the RAID controller and I believe
that it preserved my existing data when I converted the drive to
an array (of 1...), but since the manufacturer warns you about
it, you might want to save any important data elsewhere.

If you want that drive to be your boot device, then you have to
change the boot order via the BOOT menu in the BIOS.

Good luck!

...Scott

Do I have to go through the RAID setup for a single drive?!

 

[Courseyauto]

If you want that drive to be your boot device, then you have to
change the boot order via the BOOT menu in the BIOS.

Good luck!

...Scott

Do I have to go through the RAID setup for a single drive?!


If you want the SATA drive to be a bootable drive with XP or 2000 on it you
have to enable the raid controller and install the raid driver at F6 when asked
.. You need the drivers on a floppy. You then need to set the third boot
device as SCSI in the boot order. You do not have to create a raid array
unless you want to use 2 drives as raid. DOUG

 

[as mellow as a horse]

Do I have to go through the RAID setup for a single drive?!



If you want the SATA drive to be a bootable drive with XP or 2000 on it you
have to enable the raid controller and install the raid driver at F6 when asked
. You need the drivers on a floppy. You then need to set the third boot
device as SCSI in the boot order. You do not have to create a raid array
unless you want to use 2 drives as raid. DOUG

But like I said before, I'm booting off an IDE drive and want the access the
SATA as a slave drive.

 

[Scott]

Do I have to go through the RAID setup for a single drive?!

Well, I thought that was a requirement, but I decided to review
the manual again just to make sure. There is a section that states

"By default, the drive that you connect to the PRI_RAID1 connector
follow the ATA 133/100/66/33 protocol as an independent drive, not a
disk array".

So now I'm not so sure. I checked some postings on the ASUS Boards
site (http://www.abxzone.com/forums/) and one person stated that "to
get the the regular drive, you basically tell the RAID BIOS it's a
single, striped drive". Other people in the group also say that you
have to run the RAID setup to access the drive. So you may still have
to go into the RAID BIOS to at least tell it how to handle the drive.
If you want to search for more info in the forums, I would suggest
starting at
http://www.abxzone.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=41 for the
P4PE and search for: P4PE single drive.

When I first installed the drive, I did run through the RAID setup
procedure, so I'm not sure what happens if you skip it.

My single drive is listed as a "Promise 1+0/Stripe RAID0 SCSI Disk
Device" in Device Manager, if that helps at all.