Ack.. How to get my new SATA Drive to work...

[AlcHemiE]

Well i recently bought a Gigabyte GA-K8VNXP and a WB 160 gb SATA drive. I threw everything together tonight. I've built my share of systems in the past, but never SATA. I was wondering if anyone knows and websites with in depth SATA installation steps. It has three Plugs on the back... I plugged in all three, but what i dont understand is, why does it need two sources of power? Does anyone have any insight as to how this SATA stuff works? When i boot up, It doesnt detect the drive.. I've tried over and over again, but to no avail..

[AlcHemiE]

Does anyone have any insight at all? The

[MorfiusX]

The molex plug is there for convience, you only need one power source. You need to have you SATA drivers on a floppy to load when Windows Setup starts. You press F6 and load the drives at the very beginning.

[AlcHemiE]

I bought the drive OEM, it didnt come with any installation floppy or anything. I havent built a PC w/ a floppy drive in like 4 years, I didnt think anyone even used them anymore. When windows goes to load it just says that it cannot detect a hard disk.. So your telling me that i HAVE to have the drivers for it to work? Even though the motherboard has the Built-IN SATA controller?

[mcravenufo]

I install XP Pro without drivers on a floppy just fine.

Take out the extra power connector.

[DDrasus]

I hope you didnt power up the system with both power lines connected because that can damage the drive (not neccesarily)

[Headbust]

I built my first system a few weeks ago with a sata hd. I didnt know i was supposed to installl drivers for it, windows never asked during the install for ANYTHING, the only thing it asked me was quick format or long pretty much.

[Retro Rex]

I plugged in all three, but what i dont understand is, why does it need two sources of power?

Yeah you can kill the drive by using both power connectors...

[MorfiusX]

It may have been my copy of XP, but it didn't have SATA drivers for the VIA k8T800 chipset. The driver CD had the drivers on it. I copied them to the floppy and everything went great.

[AlcHemiE]

Well if i plugged in all three and killed it, why does it still show up in the RAID Menu (even though there is only 1 drive) and it shows up as a 149.05 GB HDD, not 160 GB.. Damn, i shoulda just went for two 160 gb IDE and raided them.. much easier..

[AR]

Nobody said you killed it, they just said you might have. I have also heard it may auto-install in XP, otherwise, yeah you'll need a floppy to load the drivers during the install.

[UberNewb]

I have to use the floppy to load XP... otherwise my SATA hard disk drive isn't recognized.

Mine is the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB SATA.

[OtakarJr]

ANY 160GB hard drive will show up as about 150GB in size. In marketing and sales terms, they equal 160,000,000 bytes as 160GB.

In the majority of realities, 160GB is 171,798,691,840 bytes.

So in layman's terms, everyone who buys a 160GB hard drive gets about 10GB less than they paid for. Don't you love marketing?:rolleyes:

[RuchG]

refer to this thread

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=736554

[AlcHemiE]

Cool, i'll run out tomorrow and pick up a Floppy drive.. Guess they serve some purpose after all ;)