[pixtu]

I have a problem which I believe is that the BIOS is not seeing a new SATA drive that I am hoping to use to replace an old IDE drive.

I have searched fairly widely across the Internet and most of the comments appear to refer to the use of drivers based on a floppy disk for installation with Windows. However, in my case, the disk is not even seen within the BIOS so the floppy disk part of the process is either irrelevant or premature. Those comments that cover the BIOS stage of the process appear to suggest changing various options regarding IDE/RAID settings and/or enabling SATA/RAID.

I have an MSI K8TM/K8MM motherboard - MS6741 Ver 1, the BIOS is version 1.6 which I believe to be the latest.
The SATA disk is a Hitachi Deskstar 160 GB drive - HDS5121616PLA380

I have tried the disk (and power/connection cables) on another system so know that it is working.

Within the BIOS the CMOS screen only indicates the IDE drives (with only the CD/DVD drive indicated).
In the Advanced BIOS Features screen the Boot Sequence only includes the CD/DVD drive and the Floppy Drive.
Within the PNP/PCI screen, the only potential settings that I believe might be of interest here are Plug and Play OS and IDE Busmaster, both of which are Enabled.
The Integrated Peripherals screen offers 3 options that might cover the SATA drives:
VT8237 PATA-IDE Controller - Enabled (with the options either Disabled/Enabled)
VT8237 SATA-IDE Controller - Enabled (with the options either Disabled/Enabled)
Onboard AC'97 Audio - Enabled (with the options either Disabled/Enabled) - The manual suggests that this actually includes 1394, SATA and AC'97 Audio, whereas the screen has an additional 1394 option above this. However, this is also enabled.

Virtually all the setting options only allow Disabled/Enabled.

I have tried various options within these, such as disabling the PATA option, but cannot guarantee that I have tried every permutation of the collective options.

I have several screen shots but don't know how to include them in this posting. If anyone can tell me I will happily post or email them.

My question is whether anyone has used this board with a SATA drive as the only drive and what combination of settings allow it to be used. I have not found anything other than those mentioned above that cover using/setting the SATA for IDE or RAID (the latter not being what I want anyhow).

Any help, greatly appreciated

[Advertisements]

I do not have this MB but it seems there are SATA raid drivers for this motherboard that you can download. There are 2 kinds. One is the Floppy install method which is used by clicking the F6 key when installing XP on a computer. There is also what MSI calls"PIDE/SATA Raid drivers & Utility" also.

I do not know if this is the right motherboard so you may have to find your particular one.

http://global.msi.co...amp;prod_no=237

They are at the bottom of the page. You may also have to set your computer in the BIOS to run RAID. I would also download the manual to see if it explains how to setup for SATA drives.

I was just working on a intel BTX computer, with no floppy drive, that i had to use a raid setup because the MB was slightly older and just a year ago SATA was not setup quite as well as it is now. It had to run as a Raid setup to see the sata drive. Now they can run sara as IDE in the bios releaving the problem of adding sata drivers. I ended up using NLite to incorporate the SATA drivers into XP files and burn a new XP CD to install with.

SRX660

[SRX660]

I do not have this MB but it seems there are SATA raid drivers for this motherboard that you can download. There are 2 kinds. One is the Floppy install method which is used by clicking the F6 key when installing XP on a computer. There is also what MSI calls"PIDE/SATA Raid drivers & Utility" also.

I do not know if this is the right motherboard so you may have to find your particular one.

http://global.msi.co...amp;prod_no=237

They are at the bottom of the page. You may also have to set your computer in the BIOS to run RAID. I would also download the manual to see if it explains how to setup for SATA drives.

I was just working on a intel BTX computer, with no floppy drive, that i had to use a raid setup because the MB was slightly older and just a year ago SATA was not setup quite as well as it is now. It had to run as a Raid setup to see the sata drive. Now they can run sara as IDE in the bios releaving the problem of adding sata drivers. I ended up using NLite to incorporate the SATA drivers into XP files and burn a new XP CD to install with.

SRX660

[pixtu]

Thank you for your reply SRX660

Are you suggesting that I may need to elect for RAID even if I don't want it?

There are no options within the BIOS to enable/disable RAID. However, I did try adding the drivers during the initial Win XP installation using the SATA RAID driver floppy disk that came with the MB, but the hard disk was still 'unseen'. This is what made me believe that the problem must be with the BIOS/MB settings.

Also, I understand that a minimum of 2 drives are required for RAID. Given that I only have 1, it would seem likely that this would not work anyhow. Unless you can use RAID 0 (striping) on 1 drive, which normally of course, would seem a bit pointless as there would be no performance gain from this as there would be with 2 drives.

The only mention in the manual about setting up SATA is to do with using RAID and even this would appear to assume that the disk(s) are seen in the BIOS first.

I wasn't aware how 'new' SATA was/is, but was beginning to think that the disk (which I think is SATA 2) might be too 'new' for the MB. If SATA has only been around for about a year, I could imagine that my MB's support for SATA might be in its infancy and maybe assumes that it would only be used for RAID with at least 2 drives.

If this is the case, I guess I might have to revert to a standard IDE disk.

[SRX660]

You do not need 2 hard drives to run a RAID setup. The Raid Array is seen by the computer user and operating system as just one single disk so a single drive is still seen. Many early SATA motherboards don't have Raid in the bios and that is why you use a floppy drive and the F6 key to add the drivers needed for the computer to see the SATA hard drive. These early SATA computers needed the HD drivers before windows started to load so windows would know where it needs to install to. That is why they used a floppy drive for the drivers. In reality the SATA drivers tell the computer that the SATA drive is a IDE drive so the computer runs it as such.

IDE hard drives are on their way out and soon there will be only SATA drives available, so this can be a learning experience for you on how to setup a raid system. I think that would give you bragging rights to friends because they probably don't have a clue on how to do that.

You can get by for a year or two on IDE HD's and maybe by then you will need a newer, faster computer anyway.

I downloaded the manual for the K8MM model and it says you do need 2 hard drives. The manual on the MSI website is the 77181v2.0 pdf .

SRX660

Edited by SRX660, 19 April 2008 - 12:19 PM.

[pixtu]

OK, assuming that I might have missed something, I checked the driver floppy disk and found a directory for PIDE - great I thought, the solution to my problem!

I started the system with the Win XP CD and pressed F6 at the required point, inserted the FD and realised that although the menu system only showed the 4 RAID driver directories for the Windows versions, I was able to scroll down and found four directories for ATA/IDE drivers for the Windows versions. Looking interesting. Selected the Win XP version and then pressed Enter to continue.

The CD and system chugged away and then stopped, stating that no hard disk was found! Back to square one!

Just for the sake of completeness I tried again using the RAID drivers and got the same result.

I've seen somewhere else about jumpering OPT1 to fix the speed of a drive to 150MB/s which apparently worked. Different drive and probably different board and my drive doesn't have any jumpers.

I was hoping that there was something in the BIOS that wasn't in the manual, a special key combination that opened up an extra menu option maybe. It does make me think that I just might have a new drive with an old board which together, are incompatible.

I figured that if the board had SATA ports and was supposed to support them then I wanted to use them. However .....

Thanks for your efforts, but as I have the option of swapping this SATA drive with an IDE drive in another system with a newer MB that can see the SATA drive, I really don't think that it is worth spending any more of our time on.

[Bill W]

Hi pixtu, I had exactly the same problem that your having, does your winxp have sp2 on it? If it don't that could be your problem. and as one of the other staff members already suggested, you may need your sata drivers, I did. I downloaded sata drivers on to a floppy disk from my MB web site, then I booted from my winxp CD and then push the F6 key when asked, then you will be asked to put in your floppy disk with the sata drivers on it. Then a window will popup and give you a choice to pick from, chose xp sata and thats it. That solved my problem. I hope this will help you. If you don't have winxp with sp2 on it then thats an entirely different problem. let me know.

Bill W

[pixtu]

Yes, I am using Win XP SP2 and I have tried both the PIDE and the SATA drivers on the floppy.

In all cases the hard disk is not seen either in the BIOS or by XP on installation.

Out of interest Bill, do you have the same MB?

[Bill W]

No I don't have the same MB, I have Intel DG33FBC, well when you find out what the problem was would you please let us know for future reference.

Thanks
Bill W