biofos

Hello all,

I’m biofos (John) and I’m looking for help. I’m sure you people will have answered this before; I’ve looked through the posts and can’t quite find the answer.

Problem: I’ve installed a second SATA HDD and I cannot get my machine to boot up so I can initialise or format the disk.

Machine set up: Asus P4P800 Deluxe Mobo, 80GB Raptor 10,000 HDD on SATA connection 1 is my C drive with XP Pro SP2 on and running. There’s a second 80GB HDD for backup on PRI IDE 1 which is my F drive. This system works fine.
(3.2 P4 Prescott, 1GB RAM.)

New HDD is Maxtor 200GB 7,200 SATA installed and connected to SATA 2 and powered by proper SATA cable. I do not want RAID, just 2 SATA HDD’s and my third storage HDD on IDE.

When I boot the machine with all 3 drives connected it eventually reaches the screen that tells me there’s a HDD problem and Windows cannot start. If I disconnect the new SATA all is OK, boots up to XP fine. If I disconnect the IDE drive and leave the other 2 SATA drives connected it boots to screen telling me there is no boot media selected etc. Supplier recommends I ‘tinker’ with the BIOS – this might be good advice if he included what settings to use.

I’ve tried many combinations of BIOS, to no avail. I notice that with the original configuration BIOS sees my C drive as No 4 IDE and the F drive as IDE 1. In boot device priority it lists the F drive as No1 and the C drive as No3. When I connect the 200GB drive BIOS only sees the F drive. If I have all 3 drives connected it only sees the F drive. When I boot with only C drive connected BIOS sees only the C drive but as IDE No 4. Today I removed the drives leaving only the new 200GB SATA drive on the system thinking that if I could format it via the XP setup the BIOS might recognise it. I F6’ed it at the right place in XP install, put in a floppy with copy of the files of SATA 398? off the mobo setup CD, but when I pressed the selection Promise XP driver I got ‘an unexpected error occurred in line whatever of whatever.’ So I had to abort.

Obviously I’m getting something drastically wrong here. I thought the SATA capability was straightforward especially as I’m not seeking a RAID. This is day five. I’ve read the mobo handbook and have found nothing in there which points to an answer. Can you help me please? Fortunately I can just reconnect the drives to the original configuration and at least my PC will boot properly. But I need extra storage now.

Many thanks

biofos