Serial ATA Help!?

[fracturedmind]

I just got a 36.7gig WD Raptor (10,000 rpm) Serial-ATA Hard-Drive.

For the record, I have a MSI K7N2 Delta (nForce 2 Ultra) motherboard, it has 2 SATA connections, both are the same thing, just for using two drives.

I hooked up the SATA drive to the connection, and hooked up the power, and powered on my computer... it didn't detect the drive at first.

I of course looked through my BIOS, there *is* no option for Serial-ATA, there isn't a way to turn it on or off in the BIOS, there is no Serial-ATA or SATA mentioned anywhere (I looked thru every option, and in the descriptions in the manual - also, this is the newest BIOS)

I rebooted a few times, messing with the cords, I tried pulling the power and waiting some... finally it actually detected it (by the way, in the BIOS is doesn't put it with IDE Drives, which I guess makes sense, but there is *no* way to see that it actually detected my drive unless I boot Windows XP/Linux CD and try to install to drive, etc)...

Anyways, it detected... yay, I even installed Windows XP fine, I got in, updated some stuff, and rebooted. Didn't detect it. Nothing changed.

So I waited some, I messed with wires some, rebooted tons... after waiting a bit, it detected again, loaded windows... but it stopped halfway through (guess it lost the connection again).

So... the HD does work, it is there, I just only get to see it once in a blue moon, and I don't even change anything and the next time I boot, it doesn't work.

Also, it should be noted that when I pull the plug from my comp, and wait a few minutes, and plug it in, more often than not it detects the drive for a second, and starts trying to run the RAID Setup Program (which it doesn't do when it doesn't find it at all) then crashes...

Any ideas? This is pissing me off.

[Dragonlich]

Is the serial ata controller a serial ata RAID controller? Some mobos might have issues with that. Perhaps you should flash the bios too?

FYI, I have an Asus P4P800 with the raptor, and it gets detected right away, on the 3th IDE channel; it just sees the SATA as IDE 3 and 4 in the bios, y'see.

[Jonah Hex]

please stop what you are doing and make sure youve got a floppy disk with the sata drivers on.

then boot from the winxp cd and as the cd boots look at the bottom of the screen and it will say "Press F6 if you need to install third party SCSI or RAID driver"

press the button

When the "Windows XP Setup" window is generated, press "S" to Specify an Additional Device(s)

Insert the Driver diskette into driver A: and press "Enter" key.

Choose "YOUR SATA DRIVER" from the list that appears on screen, then press the "Enter" key.

BLAH BLAH BLAH

hope this helps

Jonah Hex

[R_one]

That's not all. If that's not going to be your bootable hardrive you'll need to go under Computer Managment and format the hardrives to show up in "MY COMPUTER"

[hlprmnky]

Two more points

- the nForce2 Ultra BIOS lists the SATA boot option as 'SCSI' for some reason

- some people have claimed that in order for Windows to use an SATA drive on this controller (Si112A SATARaid), you need to go into the SATARaid BIOS and create a "RAID volume" of one disk even if you're only using one. Personally, I didn't have to do that originally, but I've since updated my BIOS to 1007 and now my Windows partition, which is on a 20GB IDE drive, can see my SATA drive in the Computer Management CP, but won't let me assign a drive letter to the FAT32 partition on that drive. Formatting the SATA drive is not an option, since that drive holds my Linux partition. But, before the BIOS update, the FAT32 partition showed up as C:, and I was able to use it to move files back and forth between Windows and Linux with no problems.

Another really good resource for nForce boards of all stripes is the forum at
NforcersHQ
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I did get a ton of help getting my mobo, SATA drive, and GeForce FX all playing nice together when I got this box last June.

Good luck!

[mystix]

i've heard some problems with raptor sata drives have loose connectors that can break. i'm pretty sure wd is giving a free replacement, might not be for the raptor though, not sure. but the windows f6 key during setup should help

[rubicon]

Seems that SATA is more trouble than it's worth at the moment. Or rather, it may work well but it's not as "plug and play" as PATA. In time I suppose.