my 2x300gb SATA drives show ok in post screens but xp refuses to display them. SATA functions all enabled in the BIOS. running new gigabyte K8NXP-SLI board. only using the silicon image controller on the board, not the nForce one.

anyone any ideas.

cheers

big sinky

 

You need to load the correct driver from the CD supplied with the motherboard, same as with SCSI drives, prior to XP install.

 

Yep when going through the initial XP install screen (as you boot from the cd) it will say press F whatever to load SCSI drivers. You are then prompted to load drivers from another cd.

Never had to do it on mine tho (single 160gb). I thought it was only if you wanted to run a SATA RAID (which I assume you do if running 2x300gb drives).

Simon.

 

Yep thats correct! thats the problem!

Dazza

 

F6 IIRC

 

done all that guys. i pulled all my IDE drives out(2x80gb) so that i would only have SATA drives in my machine. when i did a fresh install of xp i did the F6 thing and installed a silicon image SATA driver from a floppy. when i got xp installed the machine rebooted but would not pick up the fresh install of xp from the SATA drive. my IDE detection had [NONE] for all drives including DVD drives. there is no option in the BIOS to first boot from a SATA drive which i thought odd on a board of this spec(Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI). anyways the only way i could get my machine going was to stick in one of the 80 gig IDE drives and install XP on that. machine is now working and in the POST process all SATA drives are found but XP refused to show them in explorer. really baffled. probably something real simple but unless you are sitting in front of the machine its kinda hard to explain. Hope i have given you guys some more info. any other thoughts?

TIA

sinky

 

As well as enabling SATA in the bios & also on the Integrated Peripherals menu, did you set up the array on the RAID setup screen on load up? Is the array recognised?

 

Array on setup says it is disabled. how do enable the array. i know next to nothing about RAID. the basics but not how to set up arrays (that is probably basic )

 

Make sure in the bios you boot from either HD0 or scuzzy

 

Are all the SATA & Serial ATA options on both these BIOS screens enabled like this?

 

yes my bios screen is exactly like that

 

thanks for the help guys. ended up reinstalling xp on the IDE drive then going into services it asked did i want to convert my drives. Not formatted.............................DOH!!!! real Homer moment. now sitting with 1TB of disk space. should keep me going for a while. Now to see what i can O/C the winnie 3500 to

cheers

big sinky

 

have you set them up as a raid 0 aray ? or are they just running as normal disk's ?

 

just running as normal dis IIRC