SATA as single drive?

[csimon]

I ordered a raptor 70gb that should be in tomorrow. I was looking at a review and it seems that the drive is a serial drive.

What I'd like to know is ...on the NF7-S v2 ...it the SATA port a RAID port and will I have to initialize RAID in the bios for it to recongnize the drive as a single drive?

Anything I should know about this?

[shwaip]

If the RAID controller is enabled in the BIOS (It will be unless you turned it off), you should have no problems plugging and playing :d. Just format it in windows and you're good to go

[csimon]

yes it's turned off at the moment ...I am actually going to try and ghost from my old ata100 which is hdd0 now. If that works and I boot to winxp with my (fingers crossed) will I need to install any type of SATA drivers?

[madmat]

Enable the SATA driver and set it to enhanced mode since you're just running a single drive, that way you won't have to sit through the raid bios.
After you enable it and set it to enhanced you'll have windows report new hardware found so you'll need to load the drivers for it...this is important because if you ghost the drive before loading those drivers windows won't boot, you'll end up having to load them during a repair install.
If this was an Intel chipset based board you wouldn't need a special driver for the SATA but on an NF7-S you'll have to load a driver for it, once the driver is loaded and it's ghosted windows should be able to deal with the new drive on bootup.

[csimon]

hmmm ...this should be interesting ...the ghost files is an OS bootable ...so once I ghost to the raptor I intend it to be my main drive (C:\). I may have to install the drivers in advance of the ghost file.

[madmat]

Exactamundo...enable the SATA in bios...don't sweat having a drive attached, it'll still recognize the controller and ask for a driver, simply load the driver and then when you ghost to the new drive the OS will be ready for the new SATA drive.

[csimon]

Exactamundo...enable the SATA in bios...don't sweat having a drive attached, it'll still recognize the controller and ask for a driver, simply load the driver and then when you ghost to the new drive the OS will be ready for the new SATA drive. Ah thanks ...I feel better now! :D

[madmat]

Just remember man, set the SATA controller to the "ehnhanced" mode, this will allow up to 6 devices and the data on the drive won't be comprimised by the raid bios if you configure the drive.
Besides, unless you're running in raid there's really no need to set the SATA as raid, you lose some options in device manager that way.

[csimon]

ok ...how do I set the controller to enhanced mode? which bios are we talking here?
I don't see bios anything.

[madmat]

I'm not sure about the NF7-S but on mine it's under "Onboard devices/IDE Controllers" and at the bottom it says "SATA Mode" (yes my IS7 was like this as well as my Chaintech) and you can choose from; disabled, auto, combined, enhanced and raid.
If all else fails read your manual.