MAJOR CONFUSION, Added SATA drive to my p4p800

okay, I hope you can help me out, I don't consider myself a computer newbie
at all, but I'm totally lost now.

up to just last nite, I had a nice working system as follows:
p4p800 asus board
2gig ram
2 80gig ide WD drives workng as master/slave.
I used one for running windows and the other for occasional backups using
ghost from dos.

everything worked great, today, I decided to change one of the ide drives
for a sata drive. so I bought a 80gig WD sata.

so I disconnected the 2nd ide drive, left the first ide drive with no pin
(standard master setting), then connected the new sata to sata1 (also no
jumper on pins), so I guess its master.

after turning on computer, bios detected the new drive (though did not
specifically say sata for it). at this point my bios settings were still
SATA, no raid.

when booted into xp, it did not show detect drive, but it did keep lookin
for some ide chanel driver. which it never found. kept giving plenty of
errors. tried to see if new drive shows in settings/disk management, but its
not there. at this point I also installed the intel accelerated sata
driver. no change.

so I decided to go into bios, and changed to enhanced mode and RAID YES
(sata option, not sata+pata or some other). when rebooted, I noticed that
the drive was no longer being shown in bios. but I booted to xp, and no
more "ide chanel not found" message. drive still did not show in my
computer, so I went to disk management and found it there, initialized it,
formatted etc. I only had nfts format option and dynamic, no basic. so I
set it up as dynamic ntfs. so now I can use it no problem in xp. but I
cannot change it to basic or fat32.. which means I cannot use ghost to copy
OS to it etc. I can find another way to copy all windows to this new sata
drive, but it won't boot from it cause I can't make it active/primary.. not
with partition magic.

anyway, I did not want to use raid, and I am not even sure if I am using it
now. I just wanted to put everything I had on my ide drive onto the new
sata drive and boot from it, and use ide for backups ocasionally.

would someone please tell me whats going on.. why do I have to choose RAID
YES in bios, why I cannot make the sata drive basic or fat32 in disk
management, why I get IDE chanel not found if I turn off raid, etc.

thanks!!!
please remove spam protection if emailing me, or write here.
goodnite

From: "nao"

would someone please tell me whats going on.. why do I have to choose RAID
YES in bios, why I cannot make the sata drive basic or fat32 in disk
management, why I get IDE chanel not found if I turn off raid, etc.

Not really sure. But have you tried resetting the CMOS?

"PawsForThought" wrote in message
...
From: "nao"

would someone please tell me whats going on.. why do I have to choose RAID
YES in bios, why I cannot make the sata drive basic or fat32 in disk
management.

This is a WindowsXP thing. It won't let you format a drive over 32GB with
FAT32.
If you want to do that get a Win98/ME boot disk and format the drive in DOS.
Make sure you label the drives so you format the correct HDD.

You say you are not sure about the HDD jumper settings. Why don't you be
sure by checking them and getting the relevant jumper settings from the HDD
manufacturers website.

Are there any drivers for the SATA that need to be installed?

appreciate your inputs, but I can't even access this drive from DOS cause
its ntfs.

"wazza" wrote in message
...

"PawsForThought" wrote in message
...
From: "nao"

would someone please tell me whats going on.. why do I have to choose
RAID
YES in bios, why I cannot make the sata drive basic or fat32 in disk
management.

This is a WindowsXP thing. It won't let you format a drive over 32GB with
FAT32.
If you want to do that get a Win98/ME boot disk and format the drive in
DOS.
Make sure you label the drives so you format the correct HDD.

You say you are not sure about the HDD jumper settings. Why don't you be
sure by checking them and getting the relevant jumper settings from the
HDD
manufacturers website.

Are there any drivers for the SATA that need to be installed?

try accessing it from the:

control panel/performance and maintenance/administrative
tools/computer management/storage/disk management...

you should be able to access all the drives wether or not they have
been formatted...if you cannot, then you have a hardware computer
problem due to possibly an incorrect setting...



ñíñjà¤têç

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"nao" wrote in message
...
appreciate your inputs, but I can't even access this drive from DOS cause
its ntfs.



Yes you can. You are formatting the HDD aren't you?
There are probably formatting utilities that will convert the drive and
leave the data intact, but all you need to do is boot from a DOS floppy and
run fdisk.
You will need to back up your data first though using the fdisk.

You might find that SATA drive jumpers are different from IDE drive jumpers.

I have the same MB and did basically the same thing you are attempting to
do. It was not problem free (first SATA drive) but not a big issue either.

You do not want to use RAID setting in CMOS for a single drive! Also there
is no need to install the Intel AII as it will be looking for an IDE driver
that you do not have enabled on your system. What XP should detect is a
second IDE controler with one channel populated. Windows 2000 (Dual Boot)
actually finds a SATA controler but the XP method works just fine.

What I would do is remove the drive from your system and remove AII from
Add/Remove programs. Turn off the computer and restart windows. Make sure
that any reference to AII and your SATA drive have left from your XP
installation.

Next shutdown your computer and reconnect your SATA drive. Make sure you go
into CMOS and have Enhanced Mode enabled and RAID disabled. Boot to a DOS
floppy (Win98/ME) and fire up fdisk. Make sure to enable large disk
support! Your SATA drive should appear in fdisk with a non-DOS partion.
Make sure you choose the correct drive!!

You should then be able to remove the non-DOS partition and create a DOS
partion on the drive. If you want you can then reboot and with same floppy
go back and format the new partition. You can probably also format under
XP's Disk Management but as my SATA is NTFS and my current boot drive I did
not do this.

Now when you restart XP it should detect the 2nd IDE controler (which is a
duplicate of the first) and your drive on the first IDE channel. You should
be able then to initialize the disk.

Hope this helps! Good Luck,
Len

"nao" wrote in message
...
appreciate your inputs, but I can't even access this drive from DOS cause
its ntfs.

"wazza" wrote in message
...

"PawsForThought" wrote in message
...
From: "nao"

would someone please tell me whats going on.. why do I have to choose
RAID
YES in bios, why I cannot make the sata drive basic or fat32 in disk
management.

This is a WindowsXP thing. It won't let you format a drive over 32GB with
FAT32.
If you want to do that get a Win98/ME boot disk and format the drive in
DOS.
Make sure you label the drives so you format the correct HDD.

You say you are not sure about the HDD jumper settings. Why don't you be
sure by checking them and getting the relevant jumper settings from the
HDD
manufacturers website.

Are there any drivers for the SATA that need to be installed?