SATA hard drive need easy to understand solutions, Thanks

Ok, I just installed a 400 gig segate sata hard drive into an older motherboard using SYBA sata pci controler card with 4 slots. It has raid functionality which I don't want or need.

This will be used as an additional hard drive to the one I already have. It still needs formatted. I can't do right now since Windows XP won't recognize it.

I can see the new hard drive on the device manager, and in PC wizard 2008. The device manager says there is no problems with it.

I can not see it in the bios nor in device management. I have been in the bios only twice with my husband telling me what to do. I do know how to get around in it. I'm good with instructions as long as I have clear steps to follow, and no steps are missed. I'll ask questions if necessary.

I installed drivers from the controller disk, and did a windows update. I also did a roll back drivers thinking it might help, but didn't. Would I need any update drivers that were not included, if so where would I get them.

The controller card I bought can be found here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124020

My specs are:
Mainboard Biostar Group P4M266A-8235
Bios from Phoenix Technologies, LTD
Chipset VIA PrM266
Manufacturer SYX
Processor Intel Celeron D 345J

All help will be greatly appreciated.

 

Check out this link:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=148642

 

"If your new drive doesn't appear in the list, you'll probably need to enable the on board SATA in the PC BIOS...."

How do I do this?

You also commented to make sure the IDE is the master. My husband instructed me to look through the bios while on the phone with him. He had me manually try to get the bios to automatically detect the new hard drive, which it wouldn't. I never changed any settings.

I do know the IDE hard drive is set as the master. I didn't mess with any of the wires that were already in there or anything when putting in the hard drive and controller card.

I don't know what jumpers are, or how to set them.

If I need to do that, please instruct me, or send me to a website that explains with pictures on what to do.

Thank You

 

Wait a second. Since I'm using a controller card to access the sata hard drive, then my mother board does not have an on board SATA for me to enable, right? Or is that a moot point?

 

Tell us more about your system

How many IDE devices do you have installed? (include hard drives and CD/DVD drives)
Are you using both IDE flat cable sockets on the motherboard?

Does your new interface card also have IDE sockets in addition to the SATA?

Did you get any software with the SATA controller board?
Did you install it?
Have you set it up, even if you don't use RAID you may need to set it to RAID 0 which is a single drive.

It is possible if you are not using both motherboard IDE channels to disable one in BIOS and release the resources to the SATA board, you may even have to.
This is the only reason to enter the BIOS. The BIOS will not recognise the SATA drives, you need to use the setup which came with the controller card.

 

In IDE, I have 1 hard drive, 1CD Rom, 1 Floppy, and 1 DVD device, which has no power going to it now. I'll let my husband remove it, since I'd rather not mess with the IDE flat cables cables.

My mother board still has one (I believe it is called) a PCI socket left after I put in the controller card. All the old cables are the flat IDE cables.

The controller card plugs into the motherboard with IDE, and has four internal SATA slots.

Yes, I did get software with the controller card. I'm pretty sure I got it installed. I had to restart the the software on the CD to get it to install the drivers for the card.

I haven't set up RAID. Hmmmm, Maybe the software didn't install correctly, since I did have to restart it.

I do not know how to deal with the IDE channels in the BIOS, but just need a good set of instructions to do so.

From your last statement, maybe I'll try running the set up again from the software that was given, and see if it allows me to set up a RAID of 0 as you said.

Let you know how things go.

 

no luck

 

Did you check these two things out from the other thread DLB mentioned?

What is your operating system?

 

Studiot, I just talked to my husband about the jumpers. He told me not to mess with them, and wait until he gets home. He will be home tomorrow evening hopefully. He is an OTR truck driver. Will update you later on what happens.

To answer your questions, I am running windows XP server pack 2 home addition. My hard drive is a SATA, the controller is SATA, and the mother board is an older IDE. It is about 2 years old now. It is working well though. I added a 1 gig memory chip to my 512 without any problems.

Will let you know if the jumper solves the problem or not.

 

If your motherboard is only 2 years old there should be no problem with PCI based SATA.
Seagate drives normally come with a Seagate CD. Have you tried this to partition and format the Drive? If not you can download from here.

http://www.asci-red.net/tools.htm#hmt

Any IDE channel can have two devices attached.
A floppy is not IDE
If you are going to do away with your DVD you could (but don't have to ) put both the CD and the IDE hard drive on one channel. But why would you do away with the DVD?

 

studiot, Ok, update. My husband came home. He saw a 30 second window to get into the raid to format it. I didn't realize the pause break key would halt the boot up process, so you can actually read the screens. He got the Raid configured, he told me. He did a low level format in raid. Then he was able to see it in the device manager. He was able to do a format from there. The computer recognized the drive.

Now when the computer is rebooted, it will boot up all the way to the desk top screne. It will show the desktop background, but it hangs up. None of the desk top icons appear nor does the start bar. Then my husband tells that the way he got into the drive was to disconnect the drive, and reconnect it after booting up. I know that is not good to do.

We are not trying to figure out how to get fully booted.

He did say that that the SATA drive doesn't have the jumpers that the IDE hard drive does, and that you can't set it as a master and slave. He tried having it as an extended partition.

The DVD drive is an old drive. I think about 4 to 5 years old. It belonged to the computer I gave my daughter. My husband put it in mine, since CD drive got magnetized somehow. It works fine, but I have to keep a CD in it for it to be able to open an close. That is no problem until I can replace it. He forgot that the DVD drive is strictly for DVD's. The purpose he put it in my computer for, doesn't work out. I don't need a pure DVD drive.

My husband is thinking about putting controller card in the other open PCI slot. I had two open before installing the controller card. I just choose one that would seem to be the easiest to insert the card into. I didn't think it would make that much of a difference. I did read on newegg forums that the computer can be picky at times. We'll give that a shot.

If you think of anything else, please let me know. In the meantime I'm going to keep searching while my husband is out shopping for a change. He is leaving out tomorrow though. He is looking more for a local trucking job though. I'm praying.

 

It is correct that SATA drives do not have the MASTER / SLAVE distinction. The system can distinguish between drives without jumpers.

No it is definitely not good practice to make electrical connections after the system has started.

An extended partition is not really a partition at all it is a 'container' for providing more than one partition.

Essentially a drive can have one or two partitions. (don't jump in yet)

There are two types of partition primary and extended.

In order to be bootable the drive must contain a primary partition. There can only be one primary partition on a drive. You must put the bootable operating system on that primary partition.

Because there can only really be one further partition on a drive and users may want more drives than this the rest of the space on the drive is partitioned as an 'extended partition' This acts as a 'container to place further 'logcal partitions'. These can be as numerous as you have space and drive letters for.

Logical drives in the extended partition can be used to hold data or run applications programs from, but will not boot. So a drive which only contains an extended partition with no primary will not boot, but is otherwise perfectly acceptable.

Your correct partitioning sequence is for say a 120 GB drive

1) create primary partition, say 40 GB

2) create extended partition in remainder 80GB

3) create logical partition in extended partition, say 40 GB

4) create logical partition in extended partition, say 20GB

etc etc

 

Studiot, Thanks for the information. Here is the latest. My husband installed sataraid5manager, and said raid configuration of Raid0 for the full disk. I couldn't find the dang thing on the disk. The autostart for the disk was not useful. The wizard kept saying could not find.

Now the computer boots up completely with the drive attached to the controller card. The problem now is that windows XP will still not see the drive. I can see the drive in device manager and disk management.

In disk management it says Not Initialized unallocated. Unfortunately I can't do anything with it. New Partition is grayed out, and I don't see a format. Another change I see is under properties tab policies now has checked enable write cashing on disk. That wasn't there before. The general tab says device is working properly.

I'm thinking it is something simple that we over looked at this point in time. Any thoughts. My husband went back to work. He is an over the road truck driver, and probably won't be back for another couple of weeks. Either I find a way to correct this myself, or take it in the shop again. They have a policy that I may have to wait up to 5 days to get it back though.The nearest geek squad is about an hour away. Then again I feel that you guys are just as good if not better. The only thing is that you can't directly take a look at the system.

Will wait for a reply, in the mean time I'll try to do some searching on the net.

 

I feel like I'm playing catch 22. First off, I forgot to right click on the hard drive button in the disk manager in the bottom right. That got it initialized. Then I was able to partition it using extended partition, and format. Windows recognized it, and I could see it in my computer.

Then I tried to reboot. It got all the way to my desktop background. Then it will hang there forever if I let it.

It seems like either I have it unformatted, and the computer will fully boot. If it is not formatted or has a low level format using the raid utility from boot up, then I can not see or use it. If formatted, then it will not boot all the way.

 

Look again at what I said about extended partitions. Format was not mentioned.

 

I couldn't see the hard drive in my computer without it being formatted. My mind is being dense here, but I'm not exactly sure what you were hinting at when you said to reread about the partitioning. If I just partition it, how do I access the hard drive without being able to see it in my computer? Or did I partition it wrong?

If I did the primary partition, wouldn't I have to put the operating system on that drive? I don't want the new hard drive to be the boot drive. Wouldn't that conflict with the operating system I have on my original drive? I know I had it do a logical drive. I know it had to be formatted in order for me to see the drive in my computer. What am I missing?

A good friend of mine, whom I found out has a lot of experience with computers, said it was trying to boot from the new hard drive. The sata drive doesn't have jumpers, so you can't set up master/slave relationship. I could transfer the OS system to the new drive, which I didn't really want to do. Why, because I don't want to accidentally mess things up further and not be able to boot the computer at all. I don't really want to have to mess with everything I already have set up.

He said since I can access the new hard drive when I plug it in after everything is booted, to just keep the computer on. He said they were actually made to stay on. He has been working on them since they first came out, and never quit. He isn't as familiar with the sata drives as he is with the IDE drives though.

 

Does your SATA drive have both the SATA power and Legacy power connectors plugged in? (Flat Black and Squarish white)

 

You won't see a drive (partition) in explorer (my computer) until it is formatted, this is true.

This is also why you use other software for the initial partitioning of the drive. Most drives come with the manufacters special software for doing this without using Windows. This software usually creates a primary partition.

You need Seagate Disk Wizard
If you don't have this it can be downloaded here

http://www.asci-red.net/tools.htm#hmt

Or you can go to the link and use the online version

Windows has two versions of the sofware for managing partitions

Disk Management

start>run>typein
diskmgmt.msc
Right click on the new hard drive and follow the instructions

Diskpart

start>run>typein
cmd
in the black box which open type diskpart at the > prompt


To use your large disk for data you need to

1) delete any partitions that you currently have.

2) create a new extended partition to cover the whole disk

3) create a logical drive to fill the extended partition

4) format the logical drive (not I repeat not the extended partition)

Your husband did not complete steps 3 and 4 which is where your problem lies.

If you can't now start windows, the seagate software will boot the pc from the CD it comes on.