David, you'll have to partition and format the drive for windows xp to recognize it.

start -> run... -> mmc.exe

hit enter

File -> Add/Remove Snap in

Add...

add the Disk Management Snap in

click on the Disk Management item. From there you can partition your drive, then format it. Create a new volume on the new hard drive. Format it. done. I might have missed a few steps. There are resources on the net for dealing with the specifics.

You are my new personal hero! You have no idea the crap I went through trying to solve this! Thank you so very much! This was very confusing because I thought windows was supposed to recognize unformatted drives, but I guess not always. Anyway, thanks again!

8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-)

:mrgreen:

David, Depending on your OS your system can be configured differently. With Win XP or 2000 you can have up to 6 drives (2 SATA and 4 IDE)
with 95 thru ME you are limited to 4 (2 SATA and 2 IDE). That's because under the older OS's if you enable SATA you have to disable 1 IDE interface. With XP and 2K the OS is able to recognize both IDE interfaces and both SATA interfaces. Hope this is helpful.

Well here's the next challenge: getting XP to install on a SATA drive. The XP setup doesn't recognize the SATA drive. I guess I need to do the F6 thing and install my third party SCSI/RAID driver before Windows can use the drive, right? Problem is, I have no floppy drive. I have also had a hell of a time figuring out how to flash my bios with no floppy drive. Anybody have any suggestions on either of these issues?

I apologize I didn't catch the fact that you're running XP, my mistake. You shouldn't have to install any RAID or SCSI drivers at all and your BIOS should be fine. Did your drive come with a CD? If so you should be able to boot from from the CD and partition and format your drive that way. All Maxtor drives come with Maxblast partitioning and formating software on CD just for this purpose but I don't know about Seagate. The Maxblast software is a free download at Maxtors site and I know it works on Western Digital also, but many years ago Seagate drives were not compatable with other drives (I'm talking Win 3.1 Days). This probably has changed now. Most newer ASUS MB's can update the BIOS via FTP. I have your MB Model if you give me the Drive Model I'll do a little research and get back to you ASAP. It's the least I can do after all the help you've given me with MIDI.

Thanks D. The drive, a Seagate ST380013AS, did not come with a CD (it was OEM). Here's what I don't get - using Nolan's suggestion, I already partitioned and formatted the drive with NTFS and the drive is now working in my system as an additional drive while i'm temporarily running XP from an old WD 4 GB drive. Now why can't the windows installer see it?

It sounds like the drivers for your SATA controller need to be updated. The link below will get you the latest drivers. Download them to your old drive then go into control panel/systems/device manager choose your SATA controller and Update Drivers from the location you saved them to. I also included a link to Seagates FAQ dealing with your problem. Let me know if this solves it.

http://www.asus.com/support/support.aspx

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/sata_detect.html

I forgot to mention your driver should be the second to last on the lower right hand side under Hot Downloads

Nope. This is the very same driver that i'm using. I have tried the one that came off the ASUS CD and the one [[url=http://[/URL]="http://12.24.47.40/…"]straight from Silicon Image[/]="http://12.24.47.40/…"]straight from Silicon Image[/], not that any of this has anything to do with Windows installation becuase any driver I installed while running Windows will not be usable during installation, which made me thing i needed to install the drivers during installation, but I can't because I have no floppy drive. D, you told me I shouldn't need to install a driver during setup to install to my SATA drive, but the Seagate article seems to suggest that I do. I'm just wondering what the truth is. Does it seem like this is going in circles or is it just me?

I have no experience with SATA ... but If you're trying to INSTALL XP on the SATA drive, it sounds like you'll need to do F6 and use the driver disk at that point before the installer is going to see the disk.

[EDIT] - ahh - no floppy ... can you rip one out of something else and plug it in just for this? Not sure what else to do on that one [/EDIT]]

Where in Indiana?

Hey, my Indana buddy :) I'm in Muncie. Well, I don't own a floppy drive, but I guess i'm gonna have to buy one. Oh well, they cost next to nothing. I thought they were obsolete once I got my flash drive, but apparently they're not deat yet.

So does anyone else agree? Is this the only way to go?

Why don't you get a little firewire enclosure that holds 2 drives? I got one of those for like 80 bucs and added a couple of drives to my set up flawlessly

I agree David I saw the same reference to installing a driver during setup. I've never had to use F6 as I either copy the drive, use an ISO image or have had clean installs but I've only used Maxtor drives the last 5 years or so. Can you boot the PC with your XP install CD as that may let you install the Seagate driver from CD. You'll have to set the BIOS to boot from CD first if it's not already and you may have to disconnect your old drive or XP may keep trying to install to it. Try it, it can't hurt. If that doesn't work you may have to do what zemlin suggested and use a floppy from another machine. Meanwhile I'll keep looking and try to find more info from Seagate and ASUS. Let me know what happens.

Xavier, i'm not sure about sustained rates, but as far as peak bandwidth goes, SATA is a good deal faster than Firewire, so I wouldn't want to do that, plus I plan to make a RAID 0 setup someday with the two SATA channels on my motherboard. Also, I doubtr this would solve my problem - i'm guessing the windows installer would have a hard time finding the Firewire drives as well (although it seems to have no problem finding USB drives, so i'm not totally sure.. anybody?)

D, are you telling me that the out of the box Windows XP installer will recognize your Maxtor SATA drives with no third party driver? I don;t get why you asked if I could boot from the XP install CD. This is what we have been talking about. Yes, I can boot from the CD but no, it won;t let me install from any other drives but the floppy, which I don't have. Also, I don't see why you suggested that I should disconnect the old PATA drive; windown lists all drives that it can see and gives you a choice of which one to install to, right? One more thing.. I can't take a floppy drive from another machine because [[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.recordin…"]I don't own one[/]="http://www.recordin…"]I don't own one[/].

If the F6 thing really will work, I guess it's just time to bite the bullet and get a freaking floppy drive as that would end all this frustrating nonsense. I'm just waiting to find out of the third party driver installed at the time of setup will actually solve the problem. Anybody know?

Yes David my Maxtor SATA's are recognized by the OS with no third party drivers during install. I partition and format the drives by booting from the Maxblast CD then reboot with XP CD and install the OS. Your drive is not being seen by XP not because of the drive but because the chipset on your motherboard does not fully support SATA devices without additional drivers. This is because drivers for SATA on my chipset were included when XP was released it seems yours was not. This is what Seagate is saying and seems to be supported by the fact that ASUS is providing drivers for this purpose.

The reason I asked about booting from the CD is because I thought you might be running setup from your old drive because you said XP is seeing the new drive as additional storage. Is this correct, can your Seagate be seen by device manager. If so, the drivers are working.
And to answer your question if the above is true then F6 and a floppy will solve your problem. Do you know if your mother board supports floppy drives, I'd make sure before you buy a floppy.

I mentioned disconnecting your old drive because I have had problems in the past with
drives from different vendors not working together in the same system. (Seagate and Conner with anything else) Windows does list all available drives and should give you a choice of which one to install to but we're talking windows here, this ain't UNIX.

Another thing you can check is to see if you have Plug and Play turned on in your BIOS If it is, turn it off and this will let the BIOS configure any P and P devices at bootup. This probably won't fix it because I think it's your chipset drivers but it takes the burden off of the OS to configure SATA controller. I also don't think using a disk copy utility to make the other drive bootable will work because again I think it's the chipset drivers.

Again if you can see the drive in Device Manager those drivers you loaded are working and the F6/Floppy routine will work. At this point I think it's your only option.

I guess that's it then. The chipset doesn't support SATA. This is a nice insight that I wouldn't have been able to come up with myself because I didn't understand the nature of drivers outside of Windows - Thanks D. That is so moronic since the mobo has built in SATA. :? And I though this was the best possible mobo for Athlon XP :roll: I guess it's off to the floppy drive store for me. By the way, yes, the drive is alive and well in Windows, thanks to Nolan's much appreciated suggestion. Thanks for all the help D... consider your debt repayed and then some :)

Glad to help, sorry it took so long. This is what I do all day long (I'm a network engineer) and this wasn't bad at all. You have a great MOBO and the chipset isn't the problem it's Windows as usual. My chipset is older than yours so XP has the drivers for my SATA controller on the XP CD. Since your chipset is newer the drivers weren't included on the XP CD hence you have to load them from a floppy. You would think Microsoft would have a provision for loading these drivers from CD. Even if their were newer drivers on SP2 it wouldn't help because it's download or cd only. Oh well that's Microsoft for ya Good luck!

Thanks for the clarification D.

There's a lot of info about SATA and ASUS here.
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/index.php
cheers

Thanks for the link, Roly!