Firstly, How do I go about using my Maxtor Maxline plus II SATA 150 7Y250MO drive with my existing Maxtor 6Y080MO drive..? I Have an Asus A7V600-X MoBo and installed SATA drivers from MoBo support CD on a floppy during install of XP Pro & SP2 Slipstreamed CD by using the F6 option. I've been trying for a while to get the 250Gb to work alongside the smaller operational boot drive as just storage. After a while my system started locking up when You clicked the drive letter and XP failed to recognise it completley. It was formatted when I initially had them working together with XP. I have even swaped them over using different configurations of SATA channels, cables etc but still eventually fails. At first I thought it was faulty but I recently put it in the system on its own and installed XP on it which leads me to believe it maybe something to do with the RAID drivers. I just want to use both drives independently. Am I able to do that..?? Is this why Im having problems? Will a SATA PCI card solve my problems..? Sorry for going on but Im MEGA frustrated. Any advice will be very much appreciated..... :swt:
I installed SATA RAID driver for XP from motherboard support CD which I thought was the correct driver. Or do I need to install a SATA Non RAID driver if there is one..?
I don't want to use the drives in a raid configuration as they are not identical, one is 76Gb and the other is 250Gb. I have spoken to a few "IT people" and even they don't know much about configuring SATA drives. A bit scary really as one of them is our network administrator in charge of around 300 users.
Well, VIA only has one driver for their SATA support with their chipsets. If memory serves, you only have 2 SATA ports running off the VT8237 southbridge chip on that motherboard. Their Driver for the VT8237 supports both RAID and non-RAID setups, unlike what Intel has. So, if you want to look for a RAID or non-RAID driver to try, don't, becuause it doesn't exist. You can go to VIA Arena and snag the latest VT8237 drivers for the SATA support. I'm not sure if Asus has the latest revision on their website, but there usually is a lag between when VIA (or anyother chip company) releases a new driver and when Asus puts it up. And Asus isn't alone on this either, and they do have their reasons for doing so. I don't know how you've got the power cables running around, but make sure you're not sharing the plug the hard drive is on with a fan. These don't always tend to be the best connection as far as conductivity goes, so you might not be getting the proper connection if it's setup like this. I know, SATA drives use a different power connector, but I'm not talking about that. If you're using a SATA power adapter, make sure it's the only one on that plug.
Sorry about the delay I've been busy with starting a business. The way I have cables connected is I have two IDE HDD power connectors, one is attached to my gainward 5900xt graphics card and the other I have used a splitter to give me two connectors which I have used two SATA power adapters and connected both SATA drives. I have made sure no fans are connected to the disks power source. There are two which come off the CD and DVD drives power connectors. Also I have ghosted the system drive on to the 250Gb drive and named it backup drive and so far Ive had no more trouble. So does it mean that I had to have Windows and the SATA drivers also installed on the 2nd larger drive just to be able to use the extra disk as back up and storage..?
