Multiple SATA Drive instalation issues

tripolitrxtripolitrx UK
edited March 2008 in Hardware
Hi all, question about some SATA drives. I recently purchased a 500GB SATA2 drive to replace my old 80 gig IDE boot drive. I have 4 other SATA drives in the system already, two 500gb and two 300gb all holding movies/games/music etc etc. I formatted one of my 300GB drives to become the boot drive, and use the 500 for storage. This is my problem. I am having issues getting an OS onto the drive. First off when i tried to install the new drive with all the others plugged in WinXP was moaing about not having a valid Xp partition, so i created one, still didnt like it. I have done this with and wihtout a floppy with the drivers on there.

Then i unplugged all the drives except the 300 i want for an OS and proceeded to install windows. All went well, I plug the other 4 drives in, and I get a boot disc fail error. Remove the other 4 drives to test, and same error. Im kinda stumped now. This is my first time installing an OS to an SATA drive, and im runing out of ideas. Is there something im missing? Are sata cables picky about the boot drive being in SATA 1 on the mainboard?

My Board is an Asus P5NE-SLI, 4 onbard SATA controllers, and one of the drives is installed on a PCI SATA card, that drive incidentally hasnt shown up yet in the Bios or Windows setup, but im not really expecting it to untill windows is on there and drivers isntalled......(I Hope) But i need an OS first.

Any sugestions on how to get an install on there with all my SATA drives recognised? OR any trouble shooting tips you could suggest? Would be much aprpeciated.

ive tried plugging back my IDE drive to format the new drive and the old 300 drive hoping that would partition it for me to install an OS on, no such luck, and I have tried Partition Magic on there, to no avail.


Sys Spec
Asus P5NE-SLI
Core 2 Duo Processor
2 GB OCZ memory
2x500GB Seagate SATA Drives
2x300GB MAxtor SATA Drives
1x500GB WD Drive
IDE Dual Layer DVD Burner
580W Hiper PSU
Creative Labs Soundblaster Plat EX Sound Card
PCI SATA Controller

Cheers
Trip

Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited February 2008
    I would suggest removing all the hard drives except the one you wish to install the OS on. Connect that drive to your Sata1 slot. If your bios treats sata as an IDE device in terms of recognizing it for the OS then you should see it as IDE 0. You should then be able to boot up with the windows cd in the drive and install the OS without needing any sata drivers.

    Once windows is installed I would then start, one by one adding in your other drives. They'll be assigned a drive letter as they are installed and everything should work pretty straight forward after that.

    Where you may run into complications is if you aren't just using all your drives to store data. If you have programs installed onto them then you'll likely need to reinstall any of that software as the drive letters will have changed and they they will no longer be tied into your OS.
  • tripolitrxtripolitrx UK
    edited March 2008
    Oh, well I have proceeded as you sugested with a little luck, my main boot drive is now on SATA 1, I have received the disk boot failure error twice when adding new drives, but they are now on there, with teh exception of the drive in the SATA card. Windows did not install this card smoothly, there are no drivers for it as it never needed any on my other rig, but it didnt seem to like the card with the Asus drivers installed. I have managed to get ti installed now however, but on bootup the system hangs on the press Ctrl S to enter raid setup with an SATA drive plugged into it. Removing the drive gave me a boot disk failure again, and the only way around it currently is to have the XP install cd in the, having it prompt to press any key to boot from CD and not pressing anything, then it will proceed to boot as normal. Something doesnt seem to be happy on the system, im still working on it however.....any tips? The SATA Card uses the Sil 3112 chipset i believe...

    Trip
  • tripolitrxtripolitrx UK
    edited March 2008
    Well, I have narrowed it down to being the card, all my drives are installed and work with the exception of the SATA card drive. I think its down to the chipset, from what i have read, the Sil chipset either works or doesn't. Seems a new card will be in order, I am concidering Adaptec AAR-1220SA PCI-Express x1 2-Port SATA-II RAID Controller, Adaptec devices on the whole have worked well or me, does anyone have experience with this card?,

    Cheers

    trip
Sign In or Register to comment.