sata drive problem

[nbaker76]

Hi,

I currently have a windows 2000 professional machine, intel pentium 4 3.0 ghz. I recently bought a new motherboard and processer and just bought a new hard drive that is a serial ata maxtor maxline plus 2. When I installed it and booted up it seems to recognize it in the bios during boot but Windows doesn't see it....imagine that. I have service pack 4 installed, and that's all maxtor's lousy support site says about it and that they do not provide a driver for it, that the Windows 2000 installation cd would have a driver for it but i can't seem to find one. Does anyone know of a solution?

Thank you,

Nathan

 

[garebo]

In Win xp you have to load the drivers for the serial hard drive, so i imagine its the same with win 2k.
Maxtor website would have the drivers for you to install.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[nbaker76]

That's what I was afraid of but Maxtor's lousy support site says they do not offer drivers for their SATA drives. They say that they should be included with Windows 2000 SP4 or Windows XP. I have Windows 2000 Professional with SP4 installed and I even reapplied the service pack to see if it would detect the drive but nope...still doesn't recognize it. I've never had a problem getting a system to recognize an IDE drive, what is with the sata specification? I can't find any kind of drivers for it on the internet and maxtor doesn't offer them. I wish I hadn't bought this thing now.

 

[garebo]

I dont own a sata drive yet. Perhaps someone here could email you the drivers. There is a place on the net, really cool, that people can use to send files to one another, i use it all the time:

http://www.yousendit.com/

So maybe someone will read this and send you the drivers or there may not be a need, there may be a fix but i dont know of any. Someone will come to the rescue here.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[Bozz]

I think that the SATA driver comes with the motherboard. When you install Windows it gives you a chance to load SCSI or other drivers during setup and I've always used a disk that came with the motherboard.

Ian Boys
DTE Systems Ltd

 

[garebo]

Thats it, i knew i had forgotten something, the drivers come with the mobo. I have a NEO2 that has ide and sata, i only use the ide at present, but the sata drivers are indeed on the mobo cdrom.
Do you have your mobo cdrom? If not then if you bought a whole computer, somewhere on the cdrom that came with it will be your sata drivers. Maybe even on a restore cd?


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[nbaker76]

Ok that's the problem, I've installed all of the drivers from the motherboard cd, but Windows was already installed prior to installing the sata. Is there a way to force windows to install the drive post installation? My primary is an IDE drive that has windows already installed.

Thanks

 

[garebo]

Im not sure. I know that when you install win xp for the first time, at the beginning it stops and allows 3rd party drivers and that is where you install the sata drivers, i believe you press F6, but the command is at the bottom of the screen. Im pretty sure thats how it works. You install the sata drivers and then win xp continues on with full install.
It could be that you could still install them now, try booting with win xp cd and see, i guess. Unless someone else can tell you a better way. Im sure there are others that have been thru this exactly and not half-guessing as i am as im not quite sure you can do it after the fact.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[mainegeek]

nbaker76,
You said that it is seen by the bios but not Windows.What does Disk Management show? It will need to be partitioned and formated in order to work with the OS.

 

[nbaker76]

Ok got it recognized now...I had to set the jumpers to master/slave on my primary hd and dvd drives. Then I had to download Maxblast 4 from maxtor's site, create the boot disk and format the drive using maxblast. Oh yes the SATA drive had to be plugged into SATA1 or SATA3 (master ports) on my motherboard. SATA2/SATA4 are for slave drives and with the current bios revision running sata and pata you must have the sata attached as a master. It is my 3rd ide drive now after my primary hd and dvd drives. This was a real pain to do and I would not recommend trying to add a SATA drive to a system that has a PATA as the primary unless you are very comfortable with this type of thing...I would highly discourage newbies from trying to do this. Overall, if you want to go SATA (which is the way of the future as well as the 64 bit systems, PCI Express, etc)...build the system from scratch using SATA only, don't mix with an older PATA drive unless you are just going to use the PATA as storage space.

 

[Secondgunman]

Re: First Post.

From what I understand You will have to use the SATA as your primary drive. I would backup your files and setting they reinstall windows on your SATA as the primary. Most systems require you to use the newer drives as the master and the older drive for seconddary drives... I maybe wrong but that is what I understand and if it was upto me that is what I would do anyways, as the SATA drives will run your O/S better anyways.

 

[nbaker76]

Hi Secondgunman, thanks for your response. I did manage to get it working with the 80 gig maxtor ide hd as the primary master, the dvd rw as the primary slave and the 250 gig maxtor sata as secondary master, but as a storage drive. I know that windows will be a lot faster if i use the sata as my primary but i'm not worried about the speed of windows with my processor/memory power cause it already rocks. I am only using the sata as a storage drive as it is so large and installing windows on a partition of that size wouldn't really speed me up that much because of all the seek time for such a large partition. I know i could partition it in to smaller allocations, but i don't really care that much about this drive. I'm only using it as the destination when back up my dvd/cd's. Thanks again for your response as well as all the others.