sata drive installation

[Bappin]

Hey Guys Im a newb at building computers I am currently in the proccess of building my first computer. I have 2 -250G seagate baraccuda HD both sata
and 2 - liteon dvd/cd burners both are sata. I have 4 sata ports on my asus mobo. the question is do I just plug them into the mobo at the sata ports or do I have to do something differnt? and what is the best way to set them up? raid or 2 seprate drives ?

 

[Hefemeister]

You can just plug them in. If possible i like hd's in 1 and 2 cd's in 3 and 4 but it does not really matter. I would set the hard drives up as 2 different drives. 1 for os and programs and 1 for data. what os are you installing?

 

[Bappin]

cool I will do it like that , I am installing windows xp pro
thanks for the info

 

[Hefemeister]

xp does not have native sata support. What motherboard are you running?

 

[Lexluethar]

Hef is right, and if you want the SATA speeds you'll have to install a 3rd part driver for the motherboard in order for XP to see / use the SATA drives. This will have to be done while installing the operating system. If you've already installed the OS you won't be able to install this driver and you won't be taking advantage of the SATA speeds.

If you don't care about all that your motherboard can probably emulate the IDE environment and will see the hard drives just fine.

If you want to install the driver you'll have to first go into your BIOS and enable ACHP and enable SATA, then install the OS. Press F3 to install a third party driver, at that moment put a floppy disk into the computer that has the needed drivers (found on your motherboards manf website) and install them.

 

[Bappin]

I already insalled th os so i guess its to late but it seems to work ok. i am getting a blue screen on boot up after I updated windows something about hardware issue but it does boot up sometimes.
My mobo is an asus p5n-d with a intel quad core 2.66

 

[Hefemeister]

ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Support-
website for drivers for your board. Under chipset you should use this driven when installing windows.

Version 9.46

Description Make NVIDIA MCP51 SATA RAID Driver Disk for Windows XP/Vista and Windows 64bit XP/Vista.

Have you installed the rest of your drivers as well?

 

[Bappin]

yes I have updated the drivers for the video card and sound card but not the mobo I will try that udate for the mobo but do i need to make a disk to do that since my comp. wont boot up now ? I dont have a floppy on the new comp. i built but my old one has a floppy that I could prolly make disk then put floppy on the new one.
thanks for all the great help so far it is much appriciated.

 

[Hefemeister]

Yep at this point since you just installed windows I would start over. Make a floppy on your old computer and move the drive to your new one. When the XP installations starts it will say press F6 to install 3rd party drivers. Later it will ask for your disk to be inserted. This way windows will be installed correctly.

Once windows is up the first drivers to install is the chipset drivers from the website I gave you. Then you can install the network drivers. Go online and do all of your windows updates. After that install video drivers (get the newest from ati or nvidia) followed by any other drivers you need.

 

[Bappin]

ok probably a good idea what 3rd party driver do you recomend for the sata ?