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Hitachi SATA installation

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by erhwen

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I just bought a 160GB Hitachi SATA drive, and I have a Soyo P4X400 dragon lite mobo. I had installed the drive with a Silicon Image controller, my BIOS could not detect the HDD in any way, now I'm doing a low level format...I don't know if it's even possible to use this HDD on my mobo....help please!

4 replies

by cg it

well according to Soyo's web site, this board supports SATA drives with the optional SATA riser card

quote "IDE Description
Two independent channels for four IDE devices
Supports up to PIO Mode 5 and UDMA 66/100/133
Two PCI bus mastering ATA E-IDE ports
Optional Serial ATA riser cards available for support for serial ATA hard drives
here's a link to their sites web page on optional SATA riser cards http://www.soyousa.com/products/proddesc.php?id=177

by cg it

to add to Chas's comment, edit the boot sequence in the bios from boot floppy, CD-rom, hdd-0 to boot floppy, CD-Rom, SCSI. Then when you boot to your Windows CD when it asks if you have drivers to install press F6 press F6 and install the SATA drivers. Install ALL drivers for the O/S your using. Promise SATA controllers usually have 2 drivers. The 376 Controller driver and the SATA Windows driver.

by erhwen

I checked that product before the HDD even arrived. Guess what, something real funny just happened. I decided to try my luck with partition magic. I was able to format the SATA using PM in my XP Pro on my IDE primary master. And the drive could be seen in windows. However, the SATA HDD still cannot be detected in BIOS even after a BIOS update...can anyone tell me what's going on?

by thechas

Yup,

The system BIOS does NOT detect or recognize hard drives connected to separate controller cards.

If you watch the POST closely, you will see the detection of the drive connected to the controller card happens after the motherboard POST is complete, but before Windows loads.

If you ever want to boot from a hard drive connected to a plug-in controller card, you must set the first boot device to SCSI in BIOS setup.

Windows Drive manager should have seen the SATA drive, and allowed you to partition and access the drive.

Chas

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