Problems Installing New HDD

[dan246]

I just bought a Seagate Barracuda 320gb drive (ST3320620AS). I have an ASUS K8V SE Deluxe mobo and two SATA hard drives already in place, one 250gb and one 80gb. So the two original drives are taking up my two SATA connectors and I thought I could just hook the new barracuda up to the primary RAID SATA connector and call it good. (I've never done anything with arrays before.) That didn't work so I set up a stripe array using only that hard disc in an attempt to get it to work. Which, despite my flawless logic, didn't work...what a surprise. Windows won't recognize the disc and I don't really know where to go from here. Is it possible to have 3 SATA hard discs with my motherboard without setting up two in an array? Any advice would be awesome.

TIA,
Dan

 

[Nitestick]

disable the RAID controller. RAID 0 requires two equal sized disks at the very least and also requires that you format the disks as one, in other words you create the array so they are seen as one disk and format that "one" disk. you can't stripe a single disk. i don't have any specific knowledge of that board so i can't say much more.

i'm curious if when you say

Windows won't recognize the disc

you mean that it doesn't show up in "My Computer", that's because you need to format the drive. just go to control panel>administrative tools>computer management>disk management, find the diagram of the new disk to the right, it should say "unallocated" or something similar. right click on it and it should have an option like "partition", "new partition" or "partition wizard". that should guide you through partitioning and formatting it.

 

[dan246]

Yeah...poor choice of words on my part. I'm using DiscWizard which I snagged off the Seagate website. I've also tried running compmgmt.msc and using disc management. With DiscWizard I see this:

VIA SATA RAID Controller
[Drive 0] ST380817 As SCSI Disk Device
80020 MB
[Drive 2] HDS72252 5VLSA80 As SCSI Disk Device
250060 MB

Ok so in my BIOS I have:

OnChip SATA Bootrom [Enabled]
OnBoard Promise Controller [Enabled]
Operating Mode [Raid] or [OnBoard IDE Operate Mode]

When I set the operating mode to [RAID] my BIOS only displays two hard drives. (VIA VT6420 1st HDD and VIA VT6420 2nd HDD) When my computer boots up I get this message:

No array is defined.........

Press <Ctrl-F> to Enter FastBuild (tm) Utility
or <Esc> to Continue Booting...

When I go into the FastBuild Utility I can see that it recognizes the disc. It shows up as:

Channel:ID Drive Model Capacity (MB) Assignment Mode
1:SATA ST3320620AS 320072 Free U6

When I set the operating mode of the promise controller to [OnBoard IDE Operate Mode] my BIOS recognizes the two VT6420 hard drives as well as "SATA 372 TX2PLUS D0". Yet I still cannot find it in the DiscWizard or disc management utilities.

Finally, if I disable the Promise Controller alltogether the BIOS will display my two VT6420 hard drives and nothing else.

So, I'm stumped. I'm considering just replacing my 80GB with the 320GB but I would prefer not to. Any additional advice would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Dan

 

[Nitestick]

is at a SATA or SATA 2 spec'd controller? normally it's a moot point but on rare occassions drives need to be jumpered to operate in SATA mode rather than SATA 2. are there two seperate controllers for SATA i.e. a northbridge controlled set of ports and a set of ports with an independant controller? how many ports total. i'm just trying to get a mental image of possible causes and possible workarounds

 

[dan246]

Its a SATA controller. And yes, the new hdd is jumpered to operate at 1.5 Gb/s (I made sure of that). I'm not sure if there are two separate controllers but I assume there are because if I disable "OnBoard Promise Controller" in the BIOS my other 2 SATA drives still work fine. There are a total of 4 ports.

 

[Nitestick]

try switching them around onto other ports then

 

[dan246]

Ok, so I figured out that the proper BIOS settings are:
OnBoard Promise Controller [Enabled]
Operating Mode [OnBoard IDE Operate Mode]
When I did this, Windows device manager said that there was no driver installed for the controller. So I took a second look at the cd that came with the motherboard and realized there were drivers for the IDE mode that needed to be installed. I installed, rebooted, used discwizard to partition/format, and now everything is working. Thanks for the help nitestick. I appreciate the fast replys.

~Dan