[RapidHelp]

Hi,

Right from the beginning! My old hardrive died, failed to boot - i had a spare 20gig one so have used that to get me on the net in the meantime. Then i bought a sata 1tb hitachi harddrive i saw on offer. My motherboard is a ASUS A7N8X-E which now i have discovered provides all sorts of complications when installing sata drives.

The connections i have on my motherboard are sata raid 1 and sata raid 2. The motherboard is pretty old and clearly a 1st gen sata control. I have two different sata cables, one i bought myself and one that came with the hard drive - I have tried each just incase. The power is connected through an adaptor and connected correctly and the jumpers are in enabled position.

Initially the issue was the hardrive showing on the f4 raid controller screen but failing to get past this point. I disconnected it and through someones amazing instructions flashed the hardrive with an update. After this it got past there finally and onto the WINDOWS XP installation. I have downloaded 2 different sets of sata raid utility drivers from the asus website...the older set and the newer set (just incase). I loaded these at different sessions using floppy and F6 when directed at the windows setup screen - the drivers load but dont help.

I then tried using Hitachi Feature Tool and setting the 2nd Gen drive to 1.5gb and disabling the spread clocking thing I really thought id be onto a winner with this one but NO!!!! I was doing all this for 8 hours!!! I feel I may cry if i do not get this fixed ha.

What happens with BOTH windows xp and vista (i was told this has drivers included but i like xp more) is it starts to say starting up windows after loading all appropriate drivers but gives me the unbootable disk error . I really dont think its the hardrive its probably something im overlooking.

I have also tried setting serial ports to automatic in bios settings. I must add that the hardrive does not show up in the first page of the bios? Only on the f4 raid screen. It is not mentioned in the bios at all beyond there.

I do have a sata to usb connector that i can test it on with the advanced diagnostics once i finish today.

Because I have been so frustrated at not being able to fix it I called technical help who said that its because my connection on the motherboard is raid. He said that even though it shows up it will not work in the feature tool with raid and i will not be able to get it working with that connection. I told him I have a pci card with sata connections on the way and asked if this would help at all. He said that it would and i probably wouldnt have to reset it in the feature tool, with a pci card holding sata connectors i will be able to just install at 3.0 gb.

I still feel the need to ask here because if i find out hes said it to fob me off i may crack up - ya know what people on the phone can be like if they cant be bothered they'l tell you anything to get rid of you. Will this help me? Or can anyone see that im overlooking something?

This is my first time installing a sata i did the sods law thing...before my hardrive broke i gave it the almighty 'ive had my computer for 6 years and its never given me a problem' ...and it died.

[Mumbodog]

You can use an PCI sata card, but the bios must have the ability to boot from a PCI card. You may have to set first boot device to "boot other device" (page 76) but still requires the bios to detect a bootable hard drive on the pci card, not sure if it will or not, and you will have to load the pci card drivers using F6. You may get windows partially installed but it may fail if the bios cannot boot from the card on restart of setup.

Looks like it is raid 0 or 1 or nothing page 41, and 107

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/...x-e_deluxe.pdf