MSI Motherboard and Hard Drives

[wmp3662]

I need help in knowing if I can use hard drives in an older system. I have an MSI K8T Neo MS-6702 motherboard. It has one existing hard drive, Samsung SP1614C 150GB, that is the system drive. It is not working in a RAID even though it has a VIA Raid system. It has two SATA connectors for the RAID and two SATA Serial connectors. The main drive is currently connected to the SATA RAID connector though its not in a RAID.

When I added in a SATA hard drive (to one of the SATA RAID connectors) from a newer system I have Windows refused to load. I looked in the BIOS to see if the drive was recognized but no hard drives show up. Is there some other utility I need to use during bootup to see if the drives show up?

The hard drive I tried to use is a WD10EZEX 1.0 TB.

Turns out that this motherboard is SATA 1.0 compliant. So can my other SATA hard drives work with this drive?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there.

You mobo should be able to work with SATA drives indeed. Just as you've mentioned it uses SATA I interface, which means that it will probably bottleneck the drive's speed a bit, but it should be compatible.
Try a different SATA port and different cables. Make sure that your current drive (the 150GB one) is the first booting option in the boot priority menu in your BIOS. Once you've booted to Windows, check Disk Management and post a screenshot here. Here's how to open it: How to access Disk Management in Windows.

What's version of Windows are you using?

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD

 

[wmp3662]

Hey there.

You mobo should be able to work with SATA drives indeed. Just as you've mentioned it uses SATA I interface, which means that it will probably bottleneck the drive's speed a bit, but it should be compatible.
Try a different SATA port and different cables. Make sure that your current drive (the 150GB one) is the first booting option in the boot priority menu in your BIOS. Once you've booted to Windows, check Disk Management and post a screenshot here. Here's how to open it: How to access Disk Management in Windows.

What's version of Windows are you using?

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD

When I go into the BIOS I do not see the drives. I look under the basic and advanced options but only the DVD/CD ROM drive shows up (I have disabled the floppy drive ... who uses those these days and it frees up some resources I would think).

Any idea on where I should be looking in the BIOS for the drives? I tried all of the menus that seemed pertinent.

I am using Windows XP 64 Pro. XP 2.

Note: When I had the drive connected to the Serial SATA port Windows booted fine but the drive was not seen in Disk Management under the Administrative Tools section.