A7N8X BIOS not detecting RAID set

[foghat46]

OK, we all have those days, Mine has been like this all day long. Fired up my new A7N8X-Dlx with 2 new 120 G Seagate serial ATA HD's and cannot get the BIOS to recognize them. I went into the RAID Utility and set up a RAID 0 setup with 32K chunks, the utility recognizes them just fine, and created the set as Set0, as the Primary Master. Autodetect still can't find them. XP Pro setup stops because no drives detected, and Seagate DiskWizard goes as far as loading the CDROM drive and quits. The jumper on the Mobo is set to enable the SATA controller. Nowhere in the manual or BIOS can I find anything referring to SATA. I know I'm missing something, I just need someone to bring a tow truck to pull my head out of my butt. Anyone had experience with this?

Fog:D

[mike breck]

How do you have the HDs jumpered - Cable Select?

Have you connected the power connectors to each SATA HD?

The normal procedure would be:

Set jumpers
Plug in the drives and make sure they power up
Go into the raid bios and set up a 0 or 1 raid array
Load XP and press F6 during setup to load the RAID drivers

[KHT]

I think Mike has the answer. Put the SATA driver on a floppy and hit F6 to load raid\scsi drivers during install, it should detect it.

[foghat46]

Ok guys, that makes sense. Let me clue you in on what I've done since the post:

Went back to the RAID BIOS and removed the RAID set-went back to individual drives. RAID BIOS reads the disks just fine. By the way, Seagate SATA drives are jumperless , I checked Seagate's web site to confirm. Still couldn't get even the DiskWizard software to run until I manually configured the IRQ's and got the video card off of the same IRQ as the serial bus controller. After getting DiskWizard going, I formatted and partitioned each disk. The utility asks right at first what OS you will be using, so I checked Windows
XP with at least Service Pack 1. When the format screen came up, The default file system was FAT32. Thinking, "XP has the NT kernel, must be NTFS" I changed it. (Keep in mind this is about 1:30 in the morning after a braintwister day). Everything formatted just fine, but the drives are still not detected by either the BIOS or the XP cd. I should have let it format the defaults, after all I was going to change everything around once I got the system to recognize the disks. I am going to run the DiskWizard utility again and let it format to defaults, then go to RAID BIOS and set up the array, transfer the RAID and serial drivers to a flop and let them load with the XP disc. I'll post the results once I get to it. In the meantime, this is Dart Night. Mixing alcohol with the throwing of sharp pointed metal objects-now that's a sport!

[mike breck]

Seagate SATA drives are jumperless

Yes, sorry about that. My head's full of IDE/SATA converters and controller cards at the moment.

As far as I can make out, the sequence should be as follows:

Ensure that the SATA jumper is enabled on the motherboard. It's the jumper just below the mobo battery.

Put the latest XP SATA drivers from Silicon Image on a floppy

http://12.24.47.40/display/2/index.asp?c=12&cpc=ULwO0A442oKs512Q04X5i0UupP4SveI6dt2WJi7&cid=2&r=0.4531366

(Just search for SATA RAID on the link above and that will take you to the drivers section)

Connect your drives.

Bootup and enter the BIOS RAID set-up.

Choose the type of RAID you want. Use the default stripe size if you want RAID 0.

Start the XP install and press F6 when prompted to install the Silicon Image drivers

You didn't say which BIOS version your board has, but it might be idea to make sure you have the latest one from Asus. There was a data corruption problem with SATA and early BIOSes.

BTW you shouldn't need to use DiskWizard to set the HDs up. In fact, I would recommend not using it, as it may be complicating things.

HTH

[foghat46]

WhoooHoooo!!

Yep, that did it. Mike, I appreciate the assist. XP is loaded and I'm formatting the partitions now. I wiped the disks and started fresh, and once the SATA drivers loaded, things just took off. By the way, the board is a revision 2 and the BIOS version is 1003, I had already made the flash disk for the 1005 version but it wouldn't run. I'll try it again in a little bit.