SATA and GA 7VT600 1394

[robbieK]

I'm trying in install a new maxtor maxlife SATA drive to use with a GA7VT600 1394 board. Now I've used the system before with a different HDD but I have ZERO experience with SATA. I can get the RAID utility to recongize that there is one disk installed, but I want to use the SATA drive as a standard disk not as part of a raid set up. How do I do that?

I checked the SATA pdf on the gigabyte website, and the MB manual but I'm afraid I must have missed something. Windows just won't recognize the drive, even when I run a standard IDE drive with 2000 installed.
I've never had this sort of problem in the past with IDE drives...

 

[fishmahn]

First, go into the raid config and disable RAID. Since you're not using RAID, you don't want it. Be sure the SATA controller is enabled (on my KT600 board it doesn't have a disabled option - but mine's a Soyo, not Gigabyte) and RAID is disabled.

Then, on the mobo's CD (or at the mfg's website) will be an SATA driver. This older mobo needs a driver to let Windows see SATA. That driver needs to be installed for windows to recognize it. Sometimes its also called a RAID or SATA RAID driver.

If you want to boot windows from that drive (i.e., install a new copy of XP on it), then you need to copy the SATA driver to a floppy disk (only a floppy disk will work) and press F6 when prompted by Windows setup, then add the driver when prompted in setup.

If you just want to have it as an extra drive, just install the driver from CD. Windows should be able to see it at that point (after a reboot probably), and you can partition & format in Disk Administrator.

Mike.