Sata hdd not detected by Os install

[Gabriel Knight]

Hi all, I have an Acer Aspire E500 desktop im trying to install a clean
install of the OS XP Media Center Edition 2005, the sata 250 gig can been
seen in dos and fidsk and the bios but not by the start of XP media center
edition 2005 the part where you select the drive to install the OS on to -
it says no drives are detectable at all I only have the one drive and at the
moment it had 3 partitions removed and then I made a single partition and
formated it as fat32, but still no drives detected by the OS. On the
motherboard I tried another sata bus (orange plug) to see but same problem,
I have the sata hdd in the sata (1) orange bus - there are (4) of them. How
can I get the OS the see the drive?

Thanks all
Gabriel

 

[Conor]

Hi all, I have an Acer Aspire E500 desktop im trying to install a clean
install of the OS XP Media Center Edition 2005, the sata 250 gig can been
seen in dos and fidsk and the bios but not by the start of XP media center
edition 2005 the part where you select the drive to install the OS on to -
it says no drives are detectable at all I only have the one drive and at the
moment it had 3 partitions removed and then I made a single partition and
formated it as fat32, but still no drives detected by the OS. On the
motherboard I tried another sata bus (orange plug) to see but same problem,
I have the sata hdd in the sata (1) orange bus - there are (4) of them. How
can I get the OS the see the drive?

You need to either set the BIOS to run the drive in legacy or IDE mode
or you're going to have to provide the drivers for the SATA controller
during the initial install period where it states to press f6 to install
raid drivers.

 

[Gabriel Knight]

Whooa...I pressed F6 as I didnt have what was needed to continue with the
"S" option I just pressed enter but the drive was not detected I spose
because there was no sata controller installed at the point before I pressed
enter, Im going to google about what Conor said but I will need help to
install the correct software to get my hdd detected - so my next question is
what and how do I continue from here?

Thanks
Gabriel

 

[Gabriel Knight]

I forgot to add that there is no option in the bios to run the sata drive in
legacy or IDE mode, that is why I need help to install the sata controller
to get the hdd detected.

Thanks again
Gabriel

 

[Paul]

I guess your Google is broken.

http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/Other-DRIVERS-TOOLS/Others/Acer-
Aspire-E500-SATA-Driver.shtml



s

There is a Belarc Advisor dump for the E500 here.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic88885.html

Chipset Vendor ATI Technologies Inc
Chipset Model RS400/200 Host Bridge

South Bridge ALI M1573 South Bridge with Hypertransport Support

That means the motherboard uses a "mixed" chipset. An ATI Northbridge
(so AGP driver would come from ATI), and a ULI Southbridge. That was
done at the time, as the ATI Southbridge had some deficiencies. Some
manufacturers chose to use the ATI Southbridge anyway, while others
bolted on the ULI chip in its place.

*******

Steve's driver package mentions ULI M5287. That might be the name
of the SATA interface.

Since Nvidia bought ULI and crushed them, Nvidia has the remains of
drivers on their site.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/uli_drivers.html

That Softpedia driver looks sufficient to make an F6 floppy.

Or, you can take the contents of the SATA\M5287\ folder from this, and
copy that to a floppy. Using 7-ZIP, I can burrow down inside this, and
see that folder as having a TXTSETUP.OEM, which would normally be at
the top level of an F6 floppy driver install. You'd copy the contents
of the SATA\M5287\ to the floppy, such that TXTSETUP.OEM was at the
top level of the floppy.

http://http.download.nvidia.com/ULi/ULi_Integrated213.zip

SATA\M5287
WINXPA64
WIN_2000
WIN_XP <--- has m5287.sys, ulisata.cat, ULISATA.INF inside
Disk1
README.TXT
TXTSETUP.OEM

There might not be too much more in that Integrated213 of interest.
(After Windows is installed, check Device Manager and see if the USB
got detected properly or not.)

And if Windows doesn't already have drivers for the Northbridge (like AGP),
there might be a separate hunt for the ATI Northbridge. You could
start on the Acer site for that, as I don't think ATI offers drivers
for chipsets directly. In a pinch, you'd find a retail motherboard
with a similar choice of chipset chips, and get drivers for that
motherboard.

Paul

 

[Mike Easter]

I forgot to add that there is no option in the bios to run the sata drive in
legacy or IDE mode, that is why I need help to install the sata controller
to get the hdd detected.

My problem with that condition is that the XP install disk can only turn
to a floppy to look for a driver and the rig I ran into the problem with
didn't have a fdd.

You would have to rewrite your own XP install disk or borrow a floppy
drive or find some other work around.