[RESOLVED]NEW DRIVE WORKS>> Installing a single SATA drive

[User5]

Hello, I'm new to this forum.

 

Im having a bit of trouble with my new setup. Basically, to make a long story short, I had an AMD64 3200+ setup for a while with an Asus K8V SE deluxe, and one day for some reason both the processor and motherboard broke. I bought a new motherboard (DFI) at first because I thought that was the only problem, and then I realized the processor was broken too. I RMA'ed that, and here I am now.

 

I set up my old motherboard with a single SATA hard drive with ease, but this board I am having a lot of difficulty. I tried doing many searches both on here and google, and I can not find any solutions. Both the manual and the online manual have no instructions for installing a single SATA hard drive, only RAID and things like that.

 

Can anyone tell me how I would go about installing a single SATA hdd on this board? I begin windows instalation, and I press F6 to install the drivers, and then press S to select both of the supplied drivers from the floppy disk, and then windows goes on to install when I press ENTER, and then says that no hard drive can be found. Are there some BIOS settings that need to be configured in order for this to install? I have tried everything to my knowledge and nothing will work.

 

Could it be my hard drive broke as well? I have another hard drive (IDE) that did an install on perfectly. When I have both hard drives connected to the power supply, I can feel them both heating up, but the IDE drive vibrates, and when I put my ear next to it I can hear it spinning, and with my SATA drive, I can feel and hear nothing.

 

Any help is appriciated, thank you

[stratosrally]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that to use SATA drives (one or more) that are NOT in an array- you do NOT use the RAID drivers.

 

You do NOT press f6. You don't have to change your BIOS settings, leave them at their defaults.

 

It should work just fine. Mine has 2 SATA Maxtor 60GB drives that are NOT in an array and they work fine without ever installing the drivers on the floppy. I currently have them AND my IDE running just fine- I am using the IDE as my boot drive currently, but most of my data is on one of the SATAs.

 

I've had each drive work alone as a boot drive, as well. I was having some other problems and ended up installing XP on each drive.

 

 

HTH,

 

Dirk

[User5]

Nope, it will still just say that it cannot find a hard drive if I just skip the processor for installing 3rd party drivers/f6 deal.

 

This sucks. I dont have a problem going and getting a new hard drive, but Im afraid if I buy another sata drive, it still wont work.

 

Is there any real difference between regular IDE harddrives and SATA ones performancewise or anything else?

 

Thanks for the reply

[RGone]

Go here and take a look at this post it explains some of the single sata stuff...

 

You are not supposed to have to apply any driver at F6 if only using a single sata drive. Choices in bios make a difference and drives that are not empty influence the setup as well. One minute I see Seagate drives causing user problems and then again it is Western Digital, but those two brands seem to crop up a lot.

 

Basically it looks like drives with information already on them or not fully blank give problems the most. And it is hard for me to tell what is wrong because most of this "help" is a result of having seen and 'overcome' the problem and then knowing an answer. If you don't have problems then often you have no ready answer.

 

I am also willing to bet I can shut my raid 0 down and pull all 3 of my other drives out and hook up one of my brand new 80gig Hitachi Sata drives and take off running with no problems and that is what amazes me.

 

RGone...

[moreDread]

User5

 

I think your main problem might be that your trying to load Raid drivers for a single SATA drive when you should be loading Base drivers. I'm not sure if nVidia do Base drivers but i'm sure one of the other forum members will know for sure.

[User5]

Thanks for the replys anyways, but nothing will work. I am thinking maybe that the hard drive may have been killed too when the processor and motherboard died as well.

 

It wont work with no F6 driver load at all, or with the floppy disc drivers loaded. I know that with my old Asus K8V SE I had to load the drivers on the floppy. They loaded right up, it recognized the hard drive, and I was on my way.

 

Even with my regular IDE hard drive I was using before with the DFI board, I installed windows xp on it no problem, and then after about 20 minutes of setting stuff up, I got a blue screen of death saying windows had to shut down to prevent damage, and since then wont even load windows past the screen where you select if you want to boot in Safe Mode, Last Working Mode, or Start Windows Regular. It freezes on any selection.

 

I guess I just have no luck with computers. First my processor and motherboard (and supposedly even my harddrive) somehow all stop working, and now I wait 2 weeks for an RMA'ed processor, buy a new 100$ motherboard (this one), and I will probably have to either buy or RMA both this motherboard now, and my harddrive. Also, the CPU_FAN on my board is very weak. I was getting <1000rpm readings and high temps because of it. I had to switch to the chassis fan connector to get 3000 rpms and good temp readings. Also, the other chassisfan connector on my board doesent work at all.

[Petrix]

Originally posted by User5

Also, the CPU_FAN on my board is very weak. I was getting <1000rpm readings and high temps because of it. I had to switch to the chassis fan connector to get 3000 rpms and good temp readings. Also, the other chassisfan connector on my board doesent work at all.

 

The DFI-board has builtin automatic fancontrollers for the CPU and chassis fans, go to PC-Health and set bouth the cpu fan fully on and chafan fully on to 25 degrees to get them working at 100% all the time.

 

As for your installation problem have you tried the 3/4 SATA ports, (the ones between AGP and CPU?). Also when I installed w2k on my SATA dirve I installed one of the drivers from the floppy that came along. I think it was named somethin like "nVIDIA Storage Driver" or something, if I installed bouth the RAID and Storage driver it wouldn't install. (Note: This was W2k SP4). I know this goes against wha RGone said but it might be worth a try. I think this was what moreDread ment...

 

Have you also confirmed that you have an Windows XP CD with slipstreamed SP1?

[Sunrider]

User5,

 

Before you get a new drive you should replace your sata cable. I am using two Sata drives not setup in raid and I did not need to install the raid drivers. I just plugged one drive into port 3 and was able to load windows with no problems. second drive connected to port 4. I had read on this site a few months back that some people were having problems with the cables that came with the DFI board.

[User5]

Okay, thanks guys I appriciate the help

 

Here is what I have tried:

Installing Windows from Sata ports 1, 2, and 3 without any drivers loaded.

Installing Windows from Sata ports 1, 2, and 3 WITH both drivers loaded.

Installing Windows from Sata ports from 1 and 3 with only the nVidia storage driver loaded. This didnt even result in a "windows cannot find hard drive" message, but just rebooted itself.

 

Is there any way I can test if the hard drive is even working or not? I dont think the SATA cable is the problem, I am using the one I was always using and I even tried the one from my DFI board, and my old Asus board just incase.

 

Thanks I think i'll buy an IDE hard drive this time around if I cant get this working, since there really isnt much of a difference anyway.

[RGone]

FAMOUS LAST WORDS!!!

I am also willing to bet I can shut my raid 0 down and pull all 3 of my other drives out and hook up one of my brand new 80gig Hitachi Sata drives and take off running with no problems and that is what amazes me.

I usually make those 'bets' with myself when I know I am going to *have to try* it and see for myself what in h*ll is going on.

 

1. Took brand new Hitachi OEM 80gig Sata drive and hooked up on Sata#3 and partitoned and formatted and made adjustments in bios until the drive *was reconginzed* in Standard CMOS Settings.

2. Inserted WinXP W/slipstreamed SP1a and off TO the the install races. NOT!!!

3. Redundant cyclic errors reading about 10 files from the CD that had never given ANY problems before. Realize here it is not considered AS read unless it is written as well. Key point!

4. Swapped CD drives due to #3 above.

5. Get WinXP finally loaded but with boot menu showing "C: Unrecgnized Opeating System" and WinXP Pro for boot choices.

6. Say oh well to #5 above and decide to "clean/full erase" drive with HGT untilities. UH OH!!!

7. Drive full erased in ~10hours and again 3rd party repartition and format. Practicing my skills I guess.

8. Try for 4 hours to install WinXP W/Slipstreamed SP1a and get Error in paged file area. Whoopee. Load Optimized defaults again and up memory voltages and start reinstall again.

9. Get to the last 5 mins of Windows setup and sit for 30mins without completion of setup. Using F6 to load only ( "nVIDIA Storage Driver" ).

10. Format C: for the 11th time and start reinstall of WinXP W/SP1a again and get to setup will complete in 3 mins this time and sit for 15 mins.Using F6 to load only ( "nVIDIA Storage Driver" ). Wow closer still. Right!

11. Format C: again and "THIS TIME" I stick in WinXP W/SP2 and the D*MN THING LOADS WINDOWS with a caveat. There is still an "C: Unrecongized Operating System" and the WinXP Pro boot menu choices.

12. Set Show All Files in WinXP and go to boot.ini and erase out the "C: Unrecognized Operating System" and save the boot.ini file and now boots like a bandit.

 

In short I never did easily install to a single Sata drive on port #3 without going to WinXP W/SP2 slipstreamed. And I even tried to use the nvtabus.sys file ( "nVIDIA Storage Driver" ) as was mentioned earlier and it was what got me to the install complete in 5 mins and 3 mins both times but never completed setup.

 

So I experienced symptoms that would NOT remain constant when using a brand new drive straight from the factory and the symptoms experienced with it were not the same as when I "full erased" that drive. After one time of having WinXP W/SP1a seem to load> I never again got it to load but had to *swap* to WinXP W/SP2 to install WinXP.

 

After swapping to WinXP W/SP2 slipstreamed the install proceeded with the speed expected for an install of WinXP on my single sata drive hooked to Sata port #3.

 

RGone...

[Petrix]

Originally posted by User5

Is there any way I can test if the hard drive is even working or not?

 

Yes, there are atleast two ways you can test it.

 

1. (assuming you can get you're bios to see it) Hook up the working IDE-drive and the SATA-drive. Set bootorder to boot from the IDE-drive with windows installed. Boot to windoors. If you have installed the whole nForce driver package it should have installed the SATA driver aswell. Rightclick on "My Computer" -> "Manage" and from there go to "Disk Management" If you can see bouth your IDE and SATA drive then it's possible the SATA drive isn't a gonner. Now assuming you se the SATA drive try to make a 80Gig partition (NOTE: delete any other partitions before you do the 80Gig partition) (your drive has 2 80gig mag-disks in it) now if you can make that partition and format it you know that 1 of the two disks are working, atleast partially. Now do full Checkdisk with "find bad sectors" (this will take long) and see if it finds any. After that do an other 80GIG partition (don't remove the old one) and repeat the same procedure.

 

ok, 2. If you can't see the HDD in disk management then take the disk to you're friends house and test it in a computer where you know the SATA contoller works. If it doesn't work in your buddy's computer either you know the drive is a gonner.

 

Ok and if you haven't got enough about testng HDD's by now I salute you . You can also try to google a software to test the hdd, or try one of seagates/hitachis don't konw if they'll work with the nForce SATA but you can always give it a try...

 

Hope you can make any sense of that....

 

RGone, I know exactly what you mean :nod:

[User5]

Okay, thanks for the support guys

 

I went out and bought a new hard drive, and sure enough that was the problem.

 

But then again, with my luck for some reason I am getting terrible gaming performance. In Wolfenstein: ET I am getting 20-40 FPS ranges in opened areas. If I look right at a texture, it can shoot up to over 275FPS however, and then right back to 30 if I look up again. Very strange problems. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling video drivers, and the drivers that came with the motherboard. Can anything explain what is going on and what could be causing such poor performance?

 

Thanks