WinXP won't recognize a SATA drive. Help Please!

[jmvcq]

I am running WinXP on an IDE HD and an A7N8X-E Motherboard. I've just
installed a SATA drive (already partitioned and formatted) to be used for
data, but XP won't recognize it. During boot the SATA shows up on the
screen as it should, right after the option about a SATA driver for RAID
(I don't have RAID or any RAID drivers). Also, I tried loading Fdisk from
a Win98 boot diskette, and Fdisk sees the SATA drive properly.

In the process of trying "everything," I added added a third HD with
Win98SE on it, booted that, and lo and behold, Win98 *does* recognize the
SATA drive right off the bat, reads the files on it, and sees it as a
normal drive in every way. XP does see the Win98 drive normally, but not
the SATA drive.

Should I just scratch XP and go back to Win98... [lol!]

I'd be very grateful for any suggestion or ides. Thank you!

 

[Guest]

jmvcq,

Check your bios for IDE/SATA/PATA setup. This can be tricky.

Nospam

 

[DL]

It is sometimes neccessary to install sata raid drivers, whether yr going to
use raid or not. This may depend on mobo or sata controler.

 

[André Cruz]

Hello,

On many motherboards the sata is configured to do RAID, in other words it's
a RAID SATA controller, this is probably what you have, you need to install
the drivers to the sata hd from floppy, or from the cd (if any) there should
be a directory or a option to create drivers disk...
There are too some motherboards that have sata as normal disks...
You can try doing a restart and the check during the startup before windows
if there isn't a option to enter sata controller bios, and after you enter
it you have probably to configure as RAID or not, after that you should do a
restart and when windows starts you should have the harware wizzard... and
just supply the disk or cd and that's it...

If not start windows and then use the Asus Cd-rom to install all drivers
necessary... if this doesn't work go to
http://usa.asus.com/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=A7N8X-E Deluxe
and download "Sillicon_v1050.zip" this is the Silicon Image Serial ATA
driver version 1.0.0.50 and SATA utility for windows XP...

 

[Peter Hutchison]

I am running WinXP on an IDE HD and an A7N8X-E Motherboard. I've just
installed a SATA drive (already partitioned and formatted) to be used for
data, but XP won't recognize it. During boot the SATA shows up on the
screen as it should, right after the option about a SATA driver for RAID
(I don't have RAID or any RAID drivers). Also, I tried loading Fdisk from
a Win98 boot diskette, and Fdisk sees the SATA drive properly.

In the process of trying "everything," I added added a third HD with
Win98SE on it, booted that, and lo and behold, Win98 *does* recognize the
SATA drive right off the bat, reads the files on it, and sees it as a
normal drive in every way. XP does see the Win98 drive normally, but not
the SATA drive.

You MUST install the SATA Drivers at the -start- of the XP install
process, press F6 at the start and it will ask you to insert a floppy
disk with the drivers on it, then the XP will install ok on your sata
drive (RAID or not).

Peter Hutchison

 

[Bob Davis]

You MUST install the SATA Drivers at the -start- of the XP install
process, press F6 at the start and it will ask you to insert a floppy
disk with the drivers on it, then the XP will install ok on your sata
drive (RAID or not).

It can be done after an XP install, as I'm typing on a machine that had one
PATA drive installed at the outset, then was upgraded to a single SATA and
later to SATA RAID0. Both SATA setups were attached to the on-chip ICH5R
controller on a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP rev. 1 mobo. Although using the on-board
Sil3112A controller on his Nvidia-chipset mobo may require changes to this
procedure, this is how I installed my SATA's on the ICH5R, first as a single
drive and then as RAID0:


1. Download latest SATA drivers and copy them to a floppy drive or other
location.

2. Shutdown XP, enter bios, and enable SATA controller. RAID was not
planned until later, but RAID mode was enabled at this time. He should
enable the Sil3112A controller.

3. Power down and attach SATA drive.

4. Boot into XP and when new hardware is hopefully found you can point to
the location of the drivers to be installed.

5. Reboot to floppy containing Norton Ghost 2003 (DOS) and clone drive to
new SATA. If he doesn't plan on transferring data from the old drive, skip
this step.

6. In my case, using SATA as the boot drive, I entered the bios and changed
the boot order with SATA the second boot device after the floppy (always
first here). He can skip this step.

His drive is not the boot drive, which should make the procedure easier, and
I don't know if he plans on transferring the data on the old drive, but once
the drive is recognized this should be simple.

His procedure may be different, but I wanted to point out that a re-install
of XP is not required to add a SATA drive to XP after the fact.

 

[Guest]

Bob,
I'm hoping you or someone else can help me here. I had a devil of a time
installing a 250 G SATA drive as an additional drive. The short story is that
the drive is installed and after some fiddling I was able to format with XP.
I chose (for better or worse) simple, dynamic, NTFS partition. The problem
is, I NEVER found a "driver" for the hard drive, Maxtor 6Y250M0. Every time I
boot, it claims it has found new hardware and needs a driver. Yet, it is
using disk.sys and PartMgr.sys. I've been all over the Maxtor CD but the
system can't find suitable drivers. What else would you suggest?

I would like to know how I can get rid of the find driver wizard that comes
up each boot. If I cancel it, the system seems to work fine and the drive
shows up fine on the device manager. If I go through and let it try to find
the driver and then say never ask me again, it still works, but now the
device manager shows error on the device and next boot I have to do it all
over again. I guess I can live with this, but there should be some fix.

My system is home built with ASUS P4C800-E and has been working well since I
built it in June. This is my first experience with XP and with SATA. Reading
the MOBO and the Maxtor manuals wasn't much help. I have gone through what I
thought was every conceivable bios setting. Originally, the SATA disk is
detected by the IDE as another IDE drive by the MOBO and comes up and works.
Using it this way, one not only gets the find hardware wizard for the disk,
but also for IDE controller and IDE channels. The ASUS disk that came with
the MOBO doesn't seem to have these either as I've tried everything. XP seems
to load some default drivers that work, but every time I reboot it asks me
for 3 drivers for the IDE controller and channels and another for the disk
itself. If I enable the Promise controller on the MOBO, at least the MOBO CD
has drivers for it which I load. That leaves me with only the "found new
hardware" wizard to contend with after each boot rather than 4. That is where
I am at the moment.

Thanks very much for any suggestions!

Fritz