Trying to Set-Up HD w/ SATA Converter

[DiBi]

I have a ASUS P4PE which has 2 SATA connectors. I purchased a IDE / SATA convertor for my WD120 HD. Besides the HD I have a DVD, DVD RW, and Tape Drive. The cables don't reach proprerly and there all tangled. I want to get the hard drive on its' own channel and clean up the cable mess.

I've hooked everything up and tried about every possible BIOS setting and cannot get the machine to boot off the SATA channel. It inevitably gets stuck at a point where the Promise driver is scanning for an IDE device. I've tried using the MBFastBuild Utility which sets up arrays. It sees the drive, but no setting there helps either. I must be missing something simple.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

:disgust::disgust::disgust:

 

[Huntress]

What is your BIOS boot device set to?

 

[P4spooky]

Set the jumper on the drive to 'CS' (Cable select) and try again.

 

[DiBi]

My BIOS boot device setting is set to floppy followed by CD ROM. Should I disable both of those? I tried the Cable Select setting and the Master setting with no luck. Does anything need to be set up in the raid array area or is that strictly for raid?

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

Darn WD drives...If this is the only drive on this channel, pull all the jumpers off and try again..

My BIOS boot device setting is set to floppy followed by CD ROM. Should I disable both of those? I

If you want it to only boot from HDD, then yes, change it to have HDD being the first boot device. That is not your current problem though.

 

[DiBi]

Does anyone know the proper way to set the system to boot from the SATA? I have reset all the original values in BIOS and starting over!

 

[kunderian]

I have almost the exact same setup as you. 2.4B@ 2.8 running on a P4PE with 2 Maxtor 160GB and 2 SIIG SATA connectors. What SATA connectors are you using? I had many problems getting RAID to run but finally I managed to configure the array, but I got a blue-screen when trying to install WinXP. Here's what you need to do:

1. In the Boot section of the BIOS, disable the IDE channels and enable the SCSI/RAID in the boot sequence. You can enable the CD-ROM's or floppy drives as well, but it takes longer to boot.

2. If you're using the SIIG SATA connectors, the main problem is configuring the power lines. On my SATA connectors, if I daisy-chained the 2 HD's and the adapters on 1 line, at least 1 drive would fail to boot (and I have a 550W PSU!) I had to spread out the power so that at most there was 1 drive and 1 adapter on one line.

3. AFAIK, the jumper settings on the HD's do not matter if you're going to be configuring RAID. The controller should detect both drives once they are powered-up.

4. if you're still having problems, connect 1 drive through the IDE port and the other through the SATA port and see if that works.


4. Make sure both drives are formatted before installing the OS. I'm pretty sure that was the reason I got the blue-screen when trying to install XP.