SATA and IDE drives combined 2

[Surrina]

I am trying to add a 500Gb sata to my ASUS P4S8X MB (Promise PDC20376 controller) which already has 4 parallel IDE drives on it. Windows XP cannot see the new drive at all. It is powered and spinning.

The BIOS routine for setting up RAID arrays CAN see the new sata drive, but I don't want to set up a RAID array, I just want to add it as a 5th drive for storage.

I guess my 1st question relates to if it is even possible to use the SATA controller to add a 5th drive, and if so how to get Windows to see it?

Thanks!

 

[felixc]

Does the system identify the SATA controller properly? The device is enabled, and no resource conflicts?

Have a look in the manual of the motherboard. ASUS will usually give a list of the allocation of the interrupt lines on the motherboard. If the promise controller is a card, instead of on the mobo, you can move the card to a different slot so that its IRQ line does not get shared with other resources. This will also show you that there are resources like COM and LPT ports that you can disable to give more IRQ lines for the more complex chips like your SATA controller.

 

[ChillLead]

Also, you've tried my computer - tools - map network drive

 

[kmcferrin]

It doesn't even show up in Disk Management (right-click My Computer and select Manage)?

If you have an option in the BIOS to disable the RAID functionality then that will probably do it. If the RAID controller is expecting to be used as RAID, then it may not present the attached drives to the OS until an array is configured.

 

[Surrina]

from felixc:
>>Does the system identify the SATA controller properly? The device is enabled, and no resource conflicts?<<

Windows does ID the controller itself becasue I loaded the latest Promise drivers from ASUS, and as evidenced by the fact that a new SCSI drive shows up in the drive list of Device Mgr. No "conflicts" are shown in the controller section of Device Mgr. The Promise controller is an on-board chip on the mobo, but I will see if IRQ allocations are listed anywhere.

from kmcferrin:
>>If you have an option in the BIOS to disable the RAID functionality then that will probably do it.... <<

The Promise FastTrack BIOS does ID the drive and offers to make it part of a RAID array. If I do not make it part of an array in the BIOS it is completely invisible to windows, and on boot it reports the disk as not being part of an array.
If I make it the only disk of a RAID 0 array, device manger identifies the RAID 1+0 array under the "disk drives" section, but has the yellow exclamation with a Code 31 error "cannot load drivers for this device". I don't know what drivers it is looking for to see this RAID array/disk as a SCSI disk?

Thanks for all your helpful posts.

Nigel

 

[Lienori]

Is it possible that your SATA controller is in fact a RAID SATA controller; it's sole purpose being to control a RAID array?

I know that my motherboard has IDE connectors, but that it also has 2 sets of SATA connectors. One for SATA RAID, the other for standard SATA drive connection.

 

[kmcferrin]

The RAID controllers will show up as a SCSI device in device manager.

When I said disable in the BIOS, I meant in the PC's main BIOS, not the RAID controller BIOS. I have an nForce3 board that has two SATA ports that can be used as RAID or non-RAID. Which mode it runs in depends on what is set in the system BIOS (regardless of the RAID controller BIOS). On my system I believe it is called "Enable/Disable RAID Option ROM". If it is enabled then it will be a RAID controller, if it is disabled then it will be regular SATA. In my case I would disable the RAID option from the BIOS and make sure that the drive is not set up as part of an array.

 

[Surrina]

from kmcferrin
>>I meant in the PC's main BIOS<<

Thank you! Although not exactly like yours, there was a setting in the main bios to "enable" the on-board ATA controller which then made everything fall in place.

I didn't think to search because the Promise controller bios was already detecting the disk even without it enabled in the main bios.

The new disk is now formatting as a single disk in a RAID 1+0 array under SCSI drives. Not sure why Windows identifies a SATA drive as a SCSI drive, but there you go.

Thanks again...