New Sata Drive Installations

[rdarnell]

I just purchased two Seagate 250GB SATA drives. I plan to install one in each of two PCs here at home. Both Motherboards are SATA Ready (both have SATA plugs), so I just figured that after I plugged the drive cable in, I would see some indication that the system recognizes that drive as it does for the IDE HDD. Not so, as I've found out, even though I set the Phoenix-Award Bios (6.00PG) to enable SATA RAID support.

Can anyone tell me what else I need to do to get this puppy going? I guess IDE & SATA can be used together on the same PC? I have many years of experience building new systems, but have never ran into this before. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks!

rdarnell

[shanenin]

To make things easy, in the bios, disable raid support, this should default them to ide mode. Just to make sure, look for any option to use ide support for sata drives. It is much easier to use ide emulation. Unless you plan on running the drives together with raid, or need to use native command quening, you don't seed to use raid mode.

For the drives to show up in "My Computer", they need to be formatted and initialized. This can be done through "Computer Management". You can get to this by typing "compmgmt.msc" in the run box. Once "computer management" opens choose, "storage", then "disk management(local)". Once you are their you can initialize and format the drives.

You could keep the raid setting in the bios, but if you do this make sure your Raid drivers are installed.