Serial ATA hard drive installation... Help!

[deevergote]

Ok, so I bought a SATA hard drive... discovered that when I opened the box today. I'm not sure if I really selected that, or if Tiger Direct just sent me the wrong thing... Regardless, it's something new to me!

So, I went to CompUSA and spent $30 I didn't have on cables to hook the thing up. Thankfully, my new Biostar motherboard (that I also didn't really need to buy a few months back...) is compatible with SATA.

I plugged everything in, turned it on with my win2k CD in the drive, and no hard drive is found. It doesn't seem to be spinning up, even though I do have the power cable attached. Everything seems right... SATA is enabled in the BIOS settings, everything is plugged in... I even removed my old IDE cables (that weren't attached to anything). Nothing.



Does anyone have any experience with such things (DoctorCipher or Accord R33, come to my rescue! )


I need to get this hard drive up and running so I can TRY to salvage what I can from my old POS drive. I can't stand being on this laptop anymore!

[Shuebakka]

So you have other drives? Did you change the jumper setting to slave if thats how your running it?

[deevergote]

SATA doesn't have master/slave settings... And my other drive is just about dead. I plan on using the new one as my main/only drive (depending on the condition of the old one... that'll be a slave if it still works).

[chile]

i don't think you need to set the jumpers on sata drives...sata power cables are slightly different, iirc...

[Shuebakka]

SATA doesn't have master/slave settings...

Oops!

[deevergote]

I got all the cables I need... everything SHOULD be hooked up properly. I just don't understand why nothing is being recognized!

[blackice]

Some motherboards with sata require you to load extra drivers to recognize the drive when you install windows. I don't know what model of motherboard you have so can't give you a link to the downloads for it, but go to the motherboard manufacturers website, find your motherboard, and look for sata drivers for it. Most the time now days there will be a raid driver and normal drivers, just grab the normal ones and stick em on a floppy. When the computer boots to the windows 2000 cd and goes into setup watch for a message along the bottom about pressing f6 to load additional mass storage devices. It should then read your floppy and give you an option of what drivers to load. Anyway heres a link that has some screenshots to help. Good luck! http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/di...ta_detect.html

[deevergote]

Thanks man! That helps a lot.

I just stuck a borrowed floppy drive on my computer (I don't have a working one of my own). I actually took the drivers from the CD that came with my motherboard (Biostar M7NCD Ultra) onto a floppy, but it gave me an error... I'm trying to figure out how to get through that now.

File \win2000\viasraid.sys caused an unexpected error (18) at line 1211 in D:\nt\private\ntos\boot\setup\oemdisk.c.

I have a feeling either my floppy got messed up, or I don't have it structured right. From what I've read on other sites (viarena.com is the best so far) the way the floppy is laid out is important.

[deevergote]

GOT IT!!!

That was it. The file structure on my floppy was wrong. I needed the files located under drivers\sata... 5 folders with various operating system designations and 2 other files.

Ok, I can finally get myself situated on that drive. Stay tuned for part 2: "How do I get my IDE drive to run as a slave?"

[deevergote]

And here's part 2!!!

I want to try to get my old IDE drive hooked up as a slave with the SATA drive. I have the jumper set to slave, and everything was plugged in... but nothing happened. Nothing started up. I just got a black screen.

I've never run a slave drive before, and now I'm trying to do it with two different types. Does anyone know how to do this?

[b33rnut010]

If the IDE drive is the onle one on the IDE bus it should be the master, not the slave... or cable select if your crazy

[blackice]

SATA and EIDE drives run on totally different interfaces, thats why there is no master/slave setting on the SATA drive. I would set your EIDE drive to master or cable select with the jumpers on the drive. You are getting a blank screen most likely because the computer is looking to boot from the EIDE drive first instead of the SATA drive. Go into bios by pressing f2, delete or whatever it is for your motherboard while booting up, and change the boot order so the SATA is above the EIDE drive.

[brownaznkid]

And here's part 2!!!

I want to try to get my old IDE drive hooked up as a slave with the SATA drive. I have the jumper set to slave, and everything was plugged in... but nothing happened. Nothing started up. I just got a black screen.

I've never run a slave drive before, and now I'm trying to do it with two different types. Does anyone know how to do this?

check your BIOS setting, it might be trying to load windows from that HD rather than from your SATA... change the boot squence

[deevergote]

Ok, cool. I'll give that a shot.

The EIDE drive is on its way out... windows 2000 is half installed on it, and won't go any further. I'm hoping that the files are still intact so I can recover some of them! That drive is no good as a master anymore. I'm not sure if it's good for anything anymore!

[Accord R33]

you should be able to just have your SATA drive plugged in, and the IDE set as primary master. SATA is only one channel, so there are no slaves. If you have your IDE drive plugged in windows will try to make it the C: during installation. to get aroudn that just keep the IDE drive unplugged, install winblows on the SATA drive, and then plug the IDE in after everything is installed.

also make sure you have the SATA drive as the first boot device