I just got a Seagate Barracuda SATA hard drive, model ST380023AS. Hooked it up, (SATA is easy to deal with after all) but the hard drive isnt being installed on startup. It gets to the fasttrack screen, then just hangs there. I tried two different data cables, with no change. Also checked if the drive spins up when it starts, and I think it did. There's already another hard drive installed, a standard ATA-133, with serious disk errors. (the reason for my new hard drive) Anyway, if anyone has some ideas as to what I should do, I'd be grateful. Asus seems to take forever answering questions, plus their forums are down.

Check your bios settings.

Bios is set to detect onboard ATA device, and boots first.

Where exactly is it being hung up? In your OS or before?

It's before the windows XP screen. It's the Promise Fasttrack controller where it just freezes.

Check all your connections, and your BIOS settings - look through your sysbo and HDD manual on how to set up an SATA device.

Unfortunately, there aren't many users around that have much experience with Serial ATA. Try booting in safe mode, then install then restart and install the Fastrack drivers. If that doesn't work, then I don't really know any more until I get some experience with Serial ATA myself.

Ok, so far I've updated to the most current mobo bios, reinstalled the Fasttrak controller, and tried switching the hard drive to secondary sata rather than primary. And so far, nothing has helped. Hopefully if/when Asus gets back to me I'll get a solution.

does the controller handle ata-150

compatibilty issues with that particular drive, in relation to the other ata-133 drive?...........i'm not familiar w/ata-150, is the cable different, same pin count?.......AMD has optimized drivers for the Promise fast trac and windows xp..........amd.com/tech resources/optimized drivers.......also try moving it into a different pci slot......one of the first three to avoid the pci bridge

Ata-150 is different, different cables, attachment, and power adapter. It all fits correctly, and I know based on my mobo's booklett and advertisement that it's compatable. It's connected physically the way it should be, judging by the instructions, the mobo just isn't installing the thing for some reason.

i edited

the previous post......by the way, someone else had this issue and talked to a promise tech who emailed a new and different set of drivers to resolve that issue

I guess I could try that, it makes sense since updating my mobo's bios didn't change the fastrack bios. Only reason I haven't done that yet is that their website says they don't offer support for fastrak cards packaged by other companies on their things. It's worth a shot though, thanks.

How have you set up the drive in the Fasttrack BIOS?

I had a similar problem, though not with a SATA drive, where I just hooked it up to the fasttrack controller, but it wouldn't show up at all...

After some help here and elsewhere, I finally found out I had to let the controller "create" a RAID out of it... It won't touch any data you've got on it or anything, just configure it to a one hdd RAID...
Once that was done, everything worked like a charm...

I guess it would be the same for you...

Hope this helps