Hi, I decided to upgrade one of my hdd to a new SATA drive and assumed that it would be simple, it would ppear not. I am using XP Pro SP2 with latest updates and have a MSI 865PE NEO2-P Mainboard. It has two SATA connections on the baord and I have tried the new drive between these connections however I still can not detect it on the Bios. The drive is a WD 160 gb 8mb cache SATA. Reading a lot of sites I have seen that if installing from scratch then you need to install the SATA driver as a third party driver when installing XP/VISTA however does this need to be done if you are just adding the drive as en extra one for storage etc on an existing install? The drive definately has power as I can hear it and I have tried turning cables round and lots of different combinations in an attempt to get it connected by the bios, which is the most up to date version. I have searched for SATA drivers for my Mainboard but found none even on thsi MSI site, however as I understand it this still wont assist the Bios in detecting it. Short of returning the SATA data cable and getting it checked at the shop can anyone shed any light on what the problem might be. I can not see how installing a Windows driver for the SATA is going to assist the Bios in detecting it because this defies all logic. Any help much appreciated Cheers
If your adding a SATA drive for extra storage than no you don't need to install SATA drivers. As song as you have another drive already installed with Windows XP/VISTA than it should detect the other storaged SATA drive. Did you get a "Setup did not find any hard disk drives" during the Windows XP installation? If you did try this: Resolving "Setup did not find any hard disk drives" during Windows XP Installation :: the How-To Geek If that doesn't work you'll need to install the drivers via floppy, assuming you have on of course... i hope you do! (http://www.hardwareforums.com/importance-floppy-drive-20763/)
Thanks for the reply. Yes I have two other standard IDE drives installed and up and running on the system. One of these drives has XP on it and the other again for storage. I have been trying all sorts still but with no avail, I have never used the SATA connections on the mainboard before and for all I know they could be faulty or the cable could be duff. There is no settings in the bios that need to be enabled to let me run a SATA drive is there? Obvisouly there is the auto detect of new HDD that it runs however this has not picked up the drive once and appears to have no settings for SATA. Once I have checked the the SATA cable is not faulty then I can move onto the mainboard and start from there. thanks
I bought 2 sata drives from Wal-mart for $100 320GB and installed them got everything worked out with out having to install ANY drivers
Ok, connect the SATA drive to your motherboard with a good SATA cable that you know works. After that, go into your BIOS settings and check if the BIOS has detected the drive. ...We'll then move on from there
Hey, there are settings in the BIOS that need to be enabled to turn on the SATA drives, If I remember correctly they should look something like this... Legacy mode ATA configuration : PATA + SATA S.ATA keep enabled : yes P.ATA keep enabled : yes PATA channel select : both Combines mode operat° : PATA first S-ATA ports definit° : PO-3rd/P1-4th Make sure to enable SATA on the board and give it another try, sounds like it is most likely turned off. Sak
Is the SATA drive appearing under your list of drives in the Standard BIOS Features menu? If a SATA controller is set to IDE mode (as opposed to RAID mode) you will not need a driver. The drive itself does not require any special driver, and the controller only needs one when set in a RAID mode. You will need to partition and format the drive, however. To do this: Go Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Here you can see all drives, formatted or not. If they're not formatted, you can right-click on the drive and select Format from the menu.
