installing SATA for the first time - HELP!!

[devans123]

This link may help
http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx...0&SubCatID=143

Dennis

[themanwhowas]

so i checked out the similar motherboards manual. cant find anything about enablinf SATA drives. In fact i did a search for "SATA" (case insensitive) and it returned 0 results.


According to hitachi's website i shouldnt need to (and cant) change jumper settings to assign the drive as primary or slave. It does it itself. It is also apparantly backward compatible with SATA due to not being able to change the jumpers or something...

The last post scared me off when i was expected to overwrite files in my system32 folder.

So im thinking that the pci card is the best option for me. but saying that, how does it work? do i install drivers for the pci card then the SATA drive will just work when plugged into that? so no SATA drivers needed?
Ive seen one with 2 SATA ports and 1 IDE. Good for me unless you can tell me a reason why not

Lastly, i only bought the SATA drive because i had a choice of either SATA or PATA and had never even heard of PATA. I have only just found out that PATA is IDE which i would have prefered. Doh

[Dr. Bob]

According to hitachi's website i shouldnt need to (and cant) change jumper settings to assign the drive as primary or slave. It does it itself. It is also apparantly backward compatible with SATA due to not being able to change the jumpers or something...

It is backwards compatible because, if necessary(!), you can set it to SATA-1!

This is not done by jumpers but by using the Drive Feature Tool. The name of the utility kind of gives away its function. They not only make jumperless mainboards nowadays you see.

I have 7 Hitachi drives from 80 to 500 GB and 4 old IBM drives. IBM is where the Drive Fitness Test and the Drive Feature Tool originate from before they were taken over by Hitachi. So I am quite familiar with these tools.

[Dr. Bob]

Oh yeah.... Almost forgot..... The reason SATA drives don't need master or slave settings is because SATA drives do not share a cable as PATA drives can do.

[devans123]

Did you download the driver package from the link I provided?
If you did you will see that all you have to do is unzip the driver package, copy the files in the "Drvdisk' folder to floppy.
Use this floppy to instal you SATA driver at the 'F6' prompt.

Dennis

[themanwhowas]

it doesnt matter now. When i set SATA to active in bios the system refuses to load at all. I have messed the bios up trying to get it to work and i dont feel confident enough to reset it.
I was going to take the SATA back but thought i should just spend some time trying to install it as a learning experience. silly me.

So it looks like its pci time but..

how does it work? do i install drivers for the pci card then the SATA drive will just work when plugged into that? so no SATA drivers needed?
Ive seen one with 2 SATA ports and 1 IDE. Good for me unless you can tell me a reason why not

thanks

[Dr. Bob]

Both integrated RAID controllers (one is PATA and the other SATA) on one of my main boards can be set to ATA or RAID (the PATA controller) and BASE or RAID (SATA) depending on whether you just want to use extra drives not in RAID arrays or drives actually in RAID arrays. You haven't told us whether your BIOS has such additional settings. If it does and it is set to RAID theoretically the controller might refuse to 'see' your drive because you have only one drive attached which is not sufficient to do anything useful on a RAID controller. And of course it might not work because it may be set to SATA-2 which might not work on the controller as I have suggested twice already. Why haven't you run the Drive Feature Test?

It would help if you told us which Hitachi drive exactly you are working with.

And if the BIOS setting has become too messed up just reset the defaults with F7 and start from there again. With the defaults most things should work. Just check whether the integrated peripherals need to be enabled after the defaults have been set.

And this main board doesn't hide by any chance the more advanced settings until you activate them as the main board of mine I mentioned does? It only shows me the 'advanced' settings after I press CTRL-F1. And I had to actually read the manual to find that out.