"john" said:
I have an ASUS P4S800D motherboard with an IDE HDD as my boot up HDD and a
SATA HDD that is not seen at all by the motherboard.
I have the SATA enabled in the BIOS, and have done a new OS install of XP
Pro and loaded the drivers when asked for post F6 request.
But still nothing, not seen when first booted and it checks SATA devices,
and no sign of it when in XP device manager etc.......
Please, help me, or give me some idea's before I go mad.
John
http://www.sis.com/support/faq/faq.php?faq_class=faq_c02&faq_id=
"1. Why can't I install Windows XP on my S-ATA HDD by SiS964?
A: You have to copy the driver paired with the motherboard
package into a floppy disc before you installing WinXP or
Windows 2000 on your system, and follow the notice showed
on the screen to insert the floopy disc. The system will
grab the needed driver from the disc to finish the installation
of S-ATA HDD automatically. Because SiS964 was announced
before than Windows XP and WinXP therefore it can't recognize
it. If you want to install a whole new WinXP (or Windows 2000)
on S-ATA HDD by SiS964, you need to copy the necessary driver
from the directory named floopy image on your driver CD to one
floopy disc. When you begin to install OS, follows the
instruction to put your disc into floopy drive. After this,
you will keep on installing your WinXP smoothly. If you use
P-ATA HDD, you don't need to do like this."
Looking at the manual, I don't see any way to recognize whether the
hardware is seeing the disk or not. The disk needs a data and a
power cable. The disk should spin up, so listen for that
sound at least.
Try changing SATA ports on the motherboard. Occasionally, a motherboard
will ship with a dead port, so try changing ports and see if your
luck improves. If it works on the other port, then RMA the
board, to get two working ports.
There are some SATA RAID controllers that refuse to operate
unless there are two disks. Based on the description of the
SIS964 on the SIS site, I don't think that is your problem
here.
Have you checked the Device Manager, to see if the driver you
installed by pressing F6 during the WinXP install, actually
got installed ? As I don't own any SATA drives, and cannot
find any pictures of a Device Manager screen when SATA drives
are installed, I don't know what you would expect to find.
When using F6 drivers on a storage device, I think the
drivers use "SCSI emulation" mode, so the keyword could
be "SCSI" or "RAID" in Device Manager.
There is some early feedback here:
http://abxzone.com/forums/search.php
http://abxzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62634&highlight=sis964+sata
HTH,
Paul
