setting up SATA drives on the P4800-E Deluxe

[nick009]

Hi, I have 1 IDE and 4 SATA drives connected to my P4800-E

they are all detected in BIOS but not in Windows XP. I only get the first two SATA drives in windows.

i have tried switching the onboard promise controller between RAID and IDE. When set to RAID the controller is detected by windows, but only 4 drives appear in BIOS, and when set to IDE, the contoller has an error 10 (this device cannot start) in windows, but 5 drives are detected in BIOS. Also when the drive detection takes place after the POST, only one drive is detected in both modes. but they still all show up in CMOS.

Does anyone know how this should be set up to run drives on all the sata ports. I don't want to do any mirroring or striping, just use the raid ports for the extra drives. I have done this on other systems with IDE drives no problems.

any thoughts anyone?
thanks,
Nick

ASUS P4800-E deluxe
1GB RAM
Matrox Video car
1 x IDE system drive
4 x SATA drives

 

[blackened144]

One thing you can try is setting the bios to do RAID. Then go into the RAID BIOS and set up each drive as its own RAID cluster. When you boot into windows the controller should pass off the cluster information to the OS and you should see the 4 individual drives.

We have servers here at work that come to us setup with RAID0 even though we ask for no RAID set up and to have it PXE boot. We almost never get them configured right and then have to boot up to 800 nodes to break the RAID0 mirror and set up the 2 drives individually and make them PXE boot. Thanks Dell.

Anyway, sorry for the little rant (I had to take a break from the DC fixing this problem right now), hope this helps..

 

[jitpublisher]

Well, have to ask...did you format and/or initialize the drives in administrative tools?

 

[nick009]

Thanks blackened, if I go into the raid bios (i take it this is "press ctrl-f to set up an array?) will I have to re-format the drives?

jitpublisher, yes the drives are formatted and have data on them. They don't show up in computer management. But i had to unplug my first two drives to use drive 3 and 4. Now I just want them all to work together as I am sick of unplugging and replugging.

 

[nick009]

ok seem to have it sorted...installed asus raid drivers instead of the promise 378 raid drivers...hmm it doesn't quite seem right, but its working...cheers