SATA HD not recognized - Promise controller

Post by **obsidian** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 4:13 am

I have an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe mobo that has 2 onboard SATA controllers, an Intel ICH5R supporting 2 SATA connectors and a Promise PDC20378 supporting 2 additional SATA connectors. (up to 4 SATA HD's in total)

I have 3 physical hard drives installed inside my computer, 2 pre-existing 120GB drives in RAID-0 and a new 300GB drive that I just popped in. The 120GB drives are connected to the Intel chipset. The 300GB is connected to the Promise chipset.

The problem I'm having is the new 300GB drive isn't being recognized by Windows in Disk Management. I'm pretty sure the problem has something to do with the Promise chipset not installed correctly.

I followed these instructions:
http://www.techsupportforum.com/archive ... 10439.html

These ports are driven by the Promise controller chip; this is an add-on controller which lives on the PCI bus. To run non-RAID on the Promise you must change the Advanced- Onboard Devices Configuration- "Onboard Promise Controller" to Enabled, and "Operating Mode" to "IDE". Then later you must load the Promise SATA378 ATA driver (http://www.asus.com/support/download/se ... ip~zaqwedc) into Windows, NOT the "FastTrak RAID" driver.

I tried installing the drivers for the chipset, but now I get a device error in Device Manager. Under "SCSI and RAID controllers", I get a device error on "WinXP Promise SATA378 (tm) IDE Controller".

Not sure what to do now. Some help? Thanks.

Post by **YourGrandpa** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 4:19 am

Download the tool from the manufactures website that will initiallize the drive so that windows will see it.

Who makes the drive?

Post by **obsidian** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 4:33 am

All of them are Seagates.

I suppose you mean, "download the tool from the HD manufactures website"?

I'll give that a try.

Post by **obsidian** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 5:24 am

Seagate Disk Wizard recognizes my Intel controller and the attached 120x2 RAID volume, but it doesn't even recognize the Promise controller.

Post by **YourGrandpa** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 5:53 pm

Sounds like you have a driver conflict or bad controller. Have you tried removing the promise controller from the device manager and re-installing it?

Post by **obsidian** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 7:50 pm

Yeah, tried uninstalling and reinstalling. Didn't work.

To test, I tried installing WinXP on the 300GB drive to see if it would pick up. I unplugged my 120x2 RAID drives (just in case), booted from WinXP CD, pressed F6 to install Promise SATA (non-raid) drivers from floppy, XP install accepts them, XP installation then reports that no hard drives were found and cannot continue with installation.

Hrm. :icon33: I assume that in this stage of installation, there can't be any possible problems with conflicts with other drivers. So I think its either the drivers are completely not recognized or its a hardware issue. What do you think? Hardware?

Post by **Tormentius** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 7:57 pm

It sounds like you've got the wrong driver...

Post by **R00k** » Fri Feb 24, 2006 1:00 am

I had a Promise SATA controller in an older system and had a similar problem trying to install XP on it.

The driver disk had 3 different drivers on it, and I wound up using the Windows 2000 driver instead of the XP driver, and it worked for some reason; never had any problems after that. Not sure if this is the same thing, but you might check to see.

Make doubly sure your BIOS settings are correct too. If you have good drivers and it still isn't working, it's either a BIOS problem or a problem with the controller.

Being the nut that I am, I would probably try plugging the drive into your known good controller too, just to make sure everything's okay with the drive, even though it's obviously a controller issue.