A8V and single SATA drive

Hi I just bought a A8V deluxe wifi mobo and a maxtor diamondmax 10 200Gb SATA HD from scan.

THe rest of the spec are AMD 3000+ 939
1GB PC3200 TwinMos
Radeon 9600 256Mb.

Motherboard post fine, and does see the hard drive as at the beginning it displays CH0 Maxtor6B2000 or something very similar.

The drive is plugged in the SATA1 port and is connected to the PSU.
The promise RAID controller doesnt see the HD but i thought it was because the HD was on the SATA1 port and not the SATA raid.

SO i boot the computer, everything posts ok, and then boots from a win XP cd. everything fine until i press enter to setup XP on the drive where it tells me that there is no drive there.

I decide to flash the bios. I download the latest bios from ASUS (a8v1009), put it on a floppy and use EZ flash to flash it. Everything seems to be fine until reboot when it tells me that the CMOS is not working. So i clear the CMOS and everything is back to normal. I so give up on the idea of flashing the bios.

I then use the ASUS CD to make a SATA driver disk frmo the makedisk utility.

So when the XP cd boots up, I install the SATA driver from the disk that was just made, and then same problem again win xp is recognising the hard drive.


Can anyone help me how do i make the system reognise the hard drive and how do i install XP on it?

CHeers for the help.

So the BIOS is seeing the drive yes? and its connected to one of the nVidia SATA headers yes?

You've installed the drivers yet windows setup is not recognising the drive?

Do the SATA Drivers install ok? Are the drivers your installing for the promise or for the nVRAID? BTW you need both storage and RAID driver for the nVRAID SATA headers, don't know why but I had similar and would only see the drives with both drivers installed

I havent installed any VIA SATA drivers at all. So ill give that a go. Cheers.

it worked!!! THanks a lot for the help

i've just purchased an Abit nv-95 mainboard, + Athlon 3200+ 939 proc, and 2 x 250gb Hitachi hard drives.

Powerup the system, enter the RAID f10, set a stirpped raid and set to bootable, along with clear drives.

The cd that came with the board (Nvidia) has 2 lots of each SATA control drivers on, one says NVRaid_32, the other NVRaid NF_95 32 then NVRaid_64 and again NVRaid_NF95_64

so the Windows cd is in the drive, regardless of ordinary of 64bit, blue screen comes up, press F6, the cd wurs away, then the option appears, press "S" select the first of the two raid drivers that it presents, hit enter and back to main screen again, then his "S" again, this time select the other raid driver, again, hit enter when finished.

It then gets to the part where is says Starting Windows, you then take the option to install rather than repair, and you get the msg that the drives could not be seen.

for the love of god i can not get any further, on some occasions it tells me that certain driver files on the floppy are corrupt, so i've been out and bought nwew ones just to be sure, but i have no idea what to do next.

The only other thing that is bugging me about this is that, according the pdf on the cd, when you go into the bios, and slect Perhperal what ever, you should see a "Raid Config" area, which i dont, but i dont know what bearing this may have on things, can anyone help??

Nvida support, well i spoke to them 3 days ago, never called me back or replied to any emails.

I'm desperate now, has anyone got any suggestions please??