SATA hard drive help

[william21]

Hello guys:

Ok, recently I bought a new HD to replace my old IDE one. I have never used a SATA drive and I'm really getting annoyed with this problem.

The SATA HD I bought is a WD Caviar SE 80GB HD - 7200, 8MB, SATA-150, OEM (from TigerDirect). I'm using the SATA cables that came with my motherboard. Now the problem is that when I connect the SATA HD and do a windows XP installation. Windows does not find a hard drive attached to the PC.

I went to integrated peripherals in BIOS and disabled SATA RAID ROM seeing I'm using only a hard drive. I'm doing this because I read I dont need to set up raid when I'm only using one hard drive. After that, went to advanced bios features and enabled "Onchip SATA RAID". Still the BIOS doesn't detect a drive when I go to standard CMOS features.

Another option was installing the drivers from a floppy that came with the motherboard, pressed F6 and selected the drivers( four different options in here, dont know why) while windows is installing but it still doesnt detect any drivers.

I tried setting a jumper to 150mb just in case and still doesnt work. I checked the HD and I can see it spins when it's plugged in, so its not the HD.

This leads me to think its the SATA cable, but I'm posting here first to get an experienced opinion on this.

Thanks so much!!!

My PC specifications are these:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
VIA K8T800 Pro/VT8237
DDR333 2GB Corsair
Rosewill B400ATX(400W max)

[Steve]

Hi, I can't tell what motherboard you have from your spec there. Could you provide more detail?

[Tetras]

The VT8237 requires F6 drivers for Windows XP but making them is not always easy. Follow this guide (for the Asus A8V, you have the same chipset in the Abit AV8).

Head to the Asus support website here:
http://support.asus.com/download/do...SLanguage=en-us

Choose motherboard, socket 939, A8V and click search, then you should get presented with a series of tabs.

Click the "Drivers" one and choose the package with a description of:
"VIA VT6420 (VT8237) SATA RAID Driver Package Version 2.20D WHQL."
for Windows 98SE/ME/NT/2K/XP/2003.

The main folder will be called VIARAID, go in there and then choose "DriverDisk", in there will be an exe called MakeDisk.exe, place a floppy disk in your drive and run that, then you'll be sorted for the F6 driver select screen when installing Windows. There is also a readme in the main directory that will tell you exactly which files to copy over if you'd rather do it manually but the MakeDisk executable should work fine

[william21]

The motherboard is a Abit VIA K8T800 Pro/VT8237 socket 939, and I tried using the ASUS sata driver but it still doesnt detect the hard drive.

Now, when I install my old IDE HD and look in the Device Manager, the VIA SATA RAID controller appears in a yellow ( ! ), when I click on properties, it tells me on the device status that the device cannot start( code 10) what does this mean?

[DratUK]

Hiya M8, frustrating to say the least. God I hated F6 and SATA.
Still hopefully the guide below will help.

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx...5&ArticleID=93

And below is the driver you need to install n the floppy.

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx...0&SubCatID=143

Read the release notes as well for added info.