Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware,microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware (
More info?)
I happen to have a P4S8X with dual SATA drives, but no IDE drives.
Initially the SATA drives were not recognized by the BIOS.
Towards the back of the motherboard manual is a page about the "RAID"
controller. At first I ignored that, since I did not want to link the disks
togther. But, eventually I got the idea that I had to do something with the
RAID controller. That was the key to success.
Specifically, pay close attention to the message during the POST about
hitting CTRL-F to enter the FastBuild controller setup. Do that. In my
case I formed two arrays of one disk each. You will need to form one array
with one disk, the new SATA disk. Be careful not to form a mirror array
involing one of your IDE disks and the SATA disk. As I recall the default
options were for mirror or stripe, but I had to use the custom/advanced
options to make the array contain just one disk.
Once you think that you have made the array correctly, reboot and watch the
POST. After some info about the IDE disks (same as before), you should see
a clear statement about the single-disk array you just created. This should
appear just before the message to hit CTRL-F to enter the FastBuild utility
(raid controller setup).
Once the BIOS can see the drive, you will need to provide XP a driver to
also see it. If this was a clean install and if XP were going to be
installed on the SATA drive, you would need to hit F6 early in the
installation and provide the driver on a floppy. Ditto if you were
"cloning" the IDE drive to the SATA drive, then wanting to boot XP from it.
The latter is where a repair installation would be necessary.
However, I assume you do NOT want to do either of these. You just want the
new hard drive to be available for data storage? For that you should be
able to install the driver from the XP desktop level, pretty much like any
other driver that is not required to boot the PC into XP. The following is
from a TXT file hat came with the drivers, found in the "winxp" directory
under the main driver directory:
1. Go to Windows [Start] [Control Panel], select [Switch to Classic View].
Then a [System] icon appears.
2. Double click [System] icon, select [Hardware] [Device Manager],
choose "RAID controllers" from the device list, click [Reinstall Driver].
3. Check "Install from a list or specific location", then specify the file
path where the
driver is, e.g. X:\Drivers\Promise\WINXP. Click [Next],.
4. The Windows XP Setup screen will appear again saying
"Setup will load support for the following mass storage devices
-WinXP Promise FastTrak 376 (tm) controller". The FastTrak 376 driver
will now be copied on to the system and entered into the Windows XP driver
database.
then click [Finish]
5. Finally, Windows XP will restart your computer.
6. Follow the instructions to complete the installation.
"My View" <no spam ple@se.com> wrote in message
news:a2UPe.11869$FA3.5087@news-server.bigpond.net.au...
>I have an Asus P4S8X motherboard (about 3 years old) with 2 SATA
>connections.
>
> I currently have installed a primary IDE 200GB harddrive (with Windows XP
> Pro SP2 installed) and a secondary IDE 80GB HD that acts as a backup
> drive.
>
> I have bought a 200GB SATA drive that I now want to instal as a second
> backup drive.
>
> When I plug in the SATA it is not recognised by the BIOS ie there appears
> to be no plug 'n play setup with this drive and the BIOS does not show it
> listed, as far as I can see. I have read about these drives being
> installed as a single RAID 0 and working that way, but I don't know how to
> do that.
>
> Any ideas how I can get this drive installed?
>
> thanks
>
> PeterH
>
)
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