SATA install

OK, I went ahead and bought a SATA drive, WD2000JS.

My motherboard is a Asus A7N8X Deluxe rev 1.04 Bios 1001.G

I have the drive plugged in using a SecureConnect cable which should supply power and communication to the drive.

I believe my motherboard is SATA I not SATA II so I have selected 150MB/s maximum transfer rate on the drives jumpers.

The problem is that the SATA detect on boot up cannot see the drive at all.

I have installed the Data LifeGuard tools from WD site but this cannot see the drive either...I have checked that the drive is plugged in OK.

Any ideas? -.-

[EDIT] Just updating SATA drivers...Made no difference, updating BIOS now...

Setting up the SATA drives sucks ass and I blame Microsoft for not looking 5 or so years ahead.... haha.

I spent a good while once trying to install the sata drive, I wanted that one to be the main drive but it didn't work. So, have an old-school drive, install xp on it, then go on the internet, download the drivers and programs from the companys site, run the programs and the drive should be up and running.

My SATA drive requires seperate cables for power and i/o. Are you sure only one cable is needed? Also be sure to enable all SATA settings in your BIOS.

Yup, all SATA drives require two cables. One for power and one for communication.

The 'SecureConnect' cable includes the power and comms cables in one...I think, WD Site says

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=981&p_created=1052339456&p_sid=Bf4jOadi&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9NjEmcF9wcm9kcz0yMDMmcF9jYXRzPTEyMyZwX3B2PTEuMjAzOzIudTAmcF9jdj0xLjEyMzsyLnUwJnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5cGU9YW5zd2Vycy5zZWFyY2hfZm5sJnBfcGFnZT0x&p_li=&p_topview=1

...but then the WD page for the cable says,

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/accessories.asp?ProdID=74

Think I'll try plugging in the old power lead too ;)

It's looking better, drive now shows in SATA detect and Data LifeGuard tools see the drive...now copying old IDE drive to the new SATA, fingers crossed, don't let me down now norton ghost ^^

It's weird what a little power can do to a drive ;)

Not out of the woods yet.

I restored the drive from Norton Ghost then set it as the boot device.

The drive boots up windows but when it gets to the place where it should display the mouse cursor and icons it reboots again.

It's going to be a long night -.-

I suggest you get rid of the "clever" SecureConnect cable and use just the SATA data and power cables. That has worked for me every time and I never ever had any problems with SATA drives.

Barney

@Shambler,

Can it boot in Safe mode? It could be a driver issue, with the normal IDE driver crashing because of the SATA drive.

Neil

Did you already have the SATA drivers installed?

Ran into that snag once before after restoring an image from a SCSI drive to IDE on an NT4 system -- the boot process would start OK, and then quickly bomb out with an 'inaccessible boot device' error, and reboot.

You may need to make sure that you have the SATA/motherboard drivers installed on the old system before making your ghost image...

Is working now, had to enable the RAID controller in windows ( was disabled to save an IRQ ).

Copied over the old drive using the WD tools, not everything copied correctly...outlook and word are both damaged and some icon links are not working, I'll just have to repair these then make a backup.

You should have been avoided all these troubles if you boot from the CD which comes with your motherboard.

That CD will help you to define/Enable RAID controller and also make a floppy disk with SATA driver for windows XP installation (you should press F6 when installing XP when the DOS part is finished).