SATA drive not showing in BIOS

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Transform

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Hi,

I have 2 drives connected to my computer, an IDE and a SATA. They both work fine from within Windows but I was just wondering why only the IDE drive shows up in the BIOS?
 
the drive has been working fine for over a year and still is fine. i just dont understand why it doesnt appear in the bios. is it because its a sata drive? my mobo is quite old, maybe 4 years ish.
 
Its a WinFast K8S 755A Series motherboard.

I have a manual called Serial ATA RAID. I do get a screen come up after the BIOS saying this:

p6140001a.jpg
 
Something I am ovelooking here. IS the SATA drive external? If it is, it's NOT going to show up on your BIOS.
 
Unless you specifically installed SATA drivers when you installed the SATA drive, technically it isn't a SATA drive anymore. At least as far as the BIOS is concerned. Without SATA drivers installed, most boards auto-switch to the IDE drive configuration.

Does this HDD show up as an IDE slave.

In any event if the drive is working correctly, and you're getting the full capacity, I'd let sleeping dogs lie, so to speak.

If you don't mind loosing all your BIOS settings, you could try removing the CMOS battery for a few minutes then replacing it. This might force re-detection of the hardware.

Myself, I think I'd let it ride.
 
In the BIOS DMI pool text scroll (when the machine is polling the hardware), just before the Windows boot screen. sometimes drives are incorrectly called "ATAPI" or "SCSI" devices also.
 
ok this is very stange but I went back into the BIOS and tried an Auto Detect and when I saved changes and restarted then went back into the BIOS, there it was:

http://img179.imageshack.us/i/image033w.jpg/

Showed up as Channel 2 Master. Not sure why I had to auto detect though. So does this mean its being seen as an IDE drive or SATA now?
 
It's running as an IDE drive. If your next question is going to be, "can I get it to run as SATA", the answer is no. There isn't much of an advantage to try. The drive can't read or write data faster than the IDE controller can throughput. Normally, the IDE speed is 100MBS or DMA-5.

Try not to let the 300 M >> bits << per second influence you. For all intents i't's advertising BS.

ATA or "PATA" buss speeds are given in Mega >>Bytes<< per second. (8 bits = 1 byte).
 
Ok so the drive is running IDE, so do most people that have SATA drives have them running as IDE?

If its working fine as IDE, do you know why I have that RAID screen that comes up after the POST? I have tried many things to get rid of it but still can't!
 
SATA won't run natively in XP, without install RAID drivers. In Vista a single SATA can be run as AHCI, which is double talk for SATA, but not RAID.

As to your RAID, did you built this computer? I actually think you can have a RAID array with IDE drives. Is it possible that these drivers are actually installed?
 
Yes I built it. When I got my SATA drive I put it in and remember having lots of trouble getting windows to see it. Then I looked in my manual and saw something about installing a SiS SATA RAID driver. This put something on my control panel called silicon raid or something but it detected no drive under it. I have since got rid of that but still have the RAID message just before the xp boot screen.
 
If you installed SATA drivers when you installed your drive, it actually is probably running as SATA. The reason that BIOS didn't pick it up, might be because of the extra "abstraction layer" of software, applied by the driver.

Older boards do not respond to running mixed mode drives as well as newer ones.

Since you do not have RAID (per se), you did not need the RAID controller panel.

However, I'm thinking that the driver itself is still installed, and you should give a lot of serious thought before you try to further tamper with it, or remove it all together.

There is a "RAID mode called "JBOD" (Google that), which is probably how your system is running.

If you tamper with the driver, you may wind up having to do a complete reinstall of the OS.

For academic purposes, newer boards make it much easier to emulate the IDE mode with SATA drives, in some cases selecting that mode, when only one drive is installed at first boot.
 
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