ASUS K8VSE deluxe &SATA

[alanparrott]

I have just built a system based on the above and , for now, have just one HDD, a SATA (Maxtor) so no need for a RAID

However, athough it boots, and seems to recognise the HD, it says there is no HD to load the OS onto!

The manual is not clear, there are 4 SATA connections (SATA1,SATA2,SEC-SATA & PRI-SATA) as the latter 2 are situated under the PRI-RAID slot, I used the first one. This gave the message "No device attached to the FASTRAK - NO BIOS installed."

I have tried using the other slots and going in to the BIOS and changing settings, like DISABLE PROMISE etc but I can not make any combination work.

I have re-booted with my XP disk in and its starts but fails when there are NO HDs for it to load on.

I am sure it must be something simple.

Thanks in advance

Alan

 

[ptbbos]

I just ran into the same thing earlier this week. You need to copy the SATA drivers to a floppy disk - they are not natively supported by XP.

If you only have SATA drive plugged into the VIA ports - the 2 ports closer to the CPU end of the board, you will see the message that the BIOS is not loaded for the Promise ports. But once you plug another drive into the Promise ports, this message goes away.

I've got my system drive plugged into the VIA port, and 2 auxilliary drives plugged into the Promise ports - if I remember correctly, the VIA ports are slightly faster, and have less overhead than the Promise ports.

 

[alanparrott]

Thanks for that fast response. I think I get your meaning but not quite sure.

Where do I get the driver? ie where do I copy it from and where once on the FD do I copy it to?

Any ideas on BIOS settings, would the default be OK?

Sorry if I sound DIM!

Thanks

Alan

 

[ptbbos]

No problem - if I recall correctly, the needed drivers should be on the cd that came with the motherboard - you should find a file called "makedisk" or something along those lines, and it will format and copy the drivers over to the floppy for you.

The defaults in the bios should be ok - if you add any more hard drives, you'll want to verify the boot device order in the bios - but if you just have the one drive, you don't need to worry about that.

 

[alanparrott]

THanks again,the problem is I cant read the CD, it seems to be able to read the XP CD but not the ASUS;-))

I get as far as please insert a bootable disk and restart and the nothing works except the XP disk which as I say only gets so far before letting me know I dont have any HD!! I think I will download from the Maxtor site and try that.

Thanks

Alan

 

[alanparrott]

I think I have made 'some' progress. I downloaded the Maxtor Blast software to CD (mine was missing), copeid the drivers and then booted from the CD. That seemed to work although it said it had formatted the drive it took ZERO seconds. I got all the way booting from XP and finished back where I started "NO DRIVES"

I will try again tomorrow and see what happens at the FORMAT stage.

Cheers

Alan

 

[ptbbos]

Sorry about the confusion - you'll need to use the Asus cd on another computer to prepare the floppy disk - XP setup can only seem to look at floppy disks for device drivers.

Once you have this floppy disk prepared, go back to the original computer. When XP setup starts, press F6 to tell it that you need to load a device driver for your install drive. At some point it will ask you to insert the floppy disk and choose a driver from the disk.

After this, XP setup will detect the drive and be able to install to it.

 

[alanparrott]

Thought I would update this in case others have problems. This could be a bit of a catch22 if you dont have access to another PC.

When loading a OS free PC with no IDE drive just SATA then take care, as follows:

1 Make sure you have the DEvice CD with drivers etc, if not download the latest from manufacturers web site,

2 Copy (Makefile) the correct files from the ASUS CD, in my case the VIA drivers, to a floppy, yep you better have one;-))

3 Boot from the SATA maufactures CD

4 Re boot from XP and pressF6 to load SCSI and other drivers, when prompted put the floppy you made in.

5 With regard to the mb use the SATA1 drive near the floppy connexctor. Getting this right is key with just the one non-RAID drive

Good luck, thanks for the advice, much of which was used from PTBBOS.

Alan

 

[coylter]

And what if you DONT HAVE A FLOPPY.

Athlon 2700xp+ (oc: 3200xp+ with 200fsb)
Radeon 9800pro (oc: 410/360)
1024mb pc3200 (5-3-3-2)
Asus A7N8X-X

 

[Crashman]

Some Asus boards can treat a USB device as a floppy!

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[ptbbos]

Some boards can emulate a floppy - but this emulation doesn't always work during the windows install process. For example, the K8V supports emulation, but it does not seem to work to provide SATA drivers during the install.