Bazzaw, this jumped out at me from your post:

"The HDD is a single Seagate ST380013AS, in RAID 0 format."

A single drive can't run in RAID 0. Or any RAID for that matter. You have to have at least 2 drives to stripe. What do you mean by that?

2ndly, I did a Google search for your WinOptimix and didn't find anything. What is that program? Did you mean Ashampoo WinOptimizer?

3dly, if a system configuration change (by the optimizer), screwed it up; then a Last Known Good startup should restore the old system info. Did you try LKG startup?

4th, if the customer needs data and have to reload, you could alway hook it up with an external USB SATA cable and get the data onto another PC first.

Lastly, if it still won't go into XP, but you CAN get through XP setup and it accepts the SATA driver, you can try just a Repair Install and see if that works. You'll need his keycode of course, and some of his programs may not work when done. But that could be an option.

cheers

Update on my SATA RAID problem

Got new Motherboard. Installed. Reinstalled Windows using F6 etc. Worked fine during warm reboots, with occasional BSOD now and again. Cold reboot next morning original problem still there. So old MB actually is OK, probably try and sell on Ebay or something. So thinking the problem is the HDDs themselves just today had delivered 2 brand new Seagate Barracuda's. Put them in, initially not found by BIOS. Couple of warm reboots later they were found, set up a RAID 0 array, formatted partitions etc and loaded Windows. Started getting a lot of BSODs saying KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR (0x0000007A) with a load of numbers, second string saying 0xC000009D. Looked it up on the lappy and the Windows knowledge base says quote: "0xC000009D, or STATUS_DEVICE_NOT_CONNECTED, indicates defective or loose data or power cables, a problem with SCSI termination, or improper controller or disk configuration."

I've got the right drivers etc, so I fiddled around with the SATA connectors, took out and reseated the power connectors to the drives and tried again. Now the BIOS doesnt even see the drives on this [cold] boot up. Whadya reckon - new SATA connectors or a new PSU? or is it my memory or processor? Spent a bit of money now trying to get this thing working would like to limit expenditure as much as possible. if it is a new PSU, do I get the same model as before (Antec True 480) or something else. There is a lot of cabling cos I have a lot of fans running and it also looks like a bit of a mammoth task to swop out the PSU.

If anyone can recommend a course of action from here or recommend a decent PSU I'd appreciate it.

Cheers
BW

How did I miss that?

Funny ironduke, yer getting soft I guess

Sorry about your prob bagwafu, sounds like a monster!

With a new mobo and new HDDs, I assume you used the SATA cables that came WITH the mobo?

If you are getting BSODs (apart from the BIOS not detecting things right), then I would venture to blame RAM or CPU before power supply. Generall a voltage problem wouldn't result in various BSODs, but I may be wrong there.

Download memtest86 and burn the ISO to CD, boot from that and let it run at least an hour. Or at least until it test ALL your RAM multiple times over.

Then, I'm drawing a blank on a good CPU tester, I use a Windows based one called CPU Stability Test. I think this is it: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download215.html
The other CPU test I use it Micro2000, but that is not free.

Then, of course, you want to use Seatools from Seagate to check the drives out.

If all else fails, it may be time to take it to a shop, though more money it may be. But I must say I'm surprised you're still having trouble after a new mobo and HDDs, shocking.

good luck

Ta Vigilante - very vigilant
Re: A single drive can't run in RAID 0. Or any RAID for that matter. You have to have at least 2 drives to stripe. What do you mean by that?
>>Must be the freezing weather downunder mate - froze my brain ... correct, its just a single drive on SATA Ch 1

2ndly, I did a Google search for your WinOptimix and didn't find anything. What is that program? Did you mean Ashampoo WinOptimizer?
>>I did same - that was the name client gave me - my guess is it was WinOptimizer he used

3dly, if a system configuration change (by the optimizer), screwed it up; then a Last Known Good startup should restore the old system info. Did you try LKG startup?
>>been there, done that ... first thing we tried, but no, didnt help

4th, if the customer needs data and have to reload, you could alway hook it up with an external USB SATA cable and get the data onto another PC first.
>> yes ... just wish I had SATA on my own PC...could wack the essentials down to that.

Lastly, if it still won't go into XP, but you CAN get through XP setup and it accepts the SATA driver, you can try just a Repair Install and see if that works. You'll need his keycode of course, and some of his programs may not work when done. But that could be an option.
>>> OK, didnt go that way - just tried a full reload of XP over the top which bombed as it supposedly couldnt read the HDD partition. Am waiting till this guy comes back from a trip - will suggest trying the format option as I dont think hes got that much info on PC.

We use this for IDE right now:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812156001

And I just found this which looks really cool:
http://www.usbgear.com/computer_cabl...atid=170%2C161

Well you can only do so much for a client! If anything it'll teach him to be more careful about backups. Besides, don't you have a "we are not responsible for data" clause when people get work done?

Oh well, good luck

Ta Vigilante my man ... hope the heats on in AZ as it snowed here yesterday.
Those adapters sound like handy gadgets, esp the SATA/USB one.
SOOoooo right about those backups - fiddling with PCs is a semi-serious hobby for me, cant help but help these silly suckers when they crash and yes, the data is their responsibility, but I say never give up too easily. Got a full ATA drive of data back from a seized drive by freezing it overnight once - went like a dream afterwards. Same scenario - silly sod hadnt done any backups. I dunno.
Cheers - will report back once Ive got it sorted
Bazzaw

I've used the freezer trick once or twice, a rare miracle! And yes, we are in in the 80s and 90 degrees up here (f). So it's pretty hot.

Don't get me wrong, out of all the PC shops in this area, our specialty is getting data, finding data, un-deleting data. Getting data when Windows has gone mad, or a program such as Go-back has trashed the partition tables. We've retrieved data in all cases.
But still, if something "can" happen, it probably will. And you likely don't want someone suing you for data-loss. Especially a company. Or even if a HDD crashes while in your care for a completely different issue. That's happened to us before. It's not pretty.

We started having people sign to bring in PCs, and sign to take them. Agree to the work. In today's sue-happy nation, it's necessary.

Just rambling, chow.

. . . the BIOS on motherboards supporting SATA don't list SATA as an option . . . that's done with a jumper on the board (even in Boot Device order in Advanced BIOS settings, SCSI must be invoked in order to make your OS recognize a SATA drive).
Have you done something as basic as set the jumper on your board to SATA recognition?

Yup, jumper is in correct position, plus BIOS is setup correctly.

I am presently waiting for a 500W ULTRA X-Connect Modular Power Supply to be delivered and after that is in I will know if that is/was the problem. I noticed the 5V line on the old PSU only pushing out 4.5V and I guess 0.5V is too much of a drop. If it is not the PSU I'll get some new memory then processor. Eventually it'll get sorted and I'll have enough bits to build another PC for my kids

BW

You will not see the individual hard disks in the motherboard bios. You will see VIA RAID 0 listed as a hard disk device under your boot menu.

First, I am not running raid. When I flashed the bios to update it and restarted Win. XP wouldn't boot or recognize the SATA hard drive. I no longer have the SATA drivers and I also no longer have a floppy driver. I am not sure where Win. XP saves the drivers for SATA hard drives, but I think flashing the bios has deleted, moved, or did something to them. My only other thought was flashing the bios does something to the MBR (I am not sure if it does). If this is the case, could Lilo or any other MBR controller be used to fix the problem? Is there a way to add the SATA drivers to the MBR?

Perhaps you should post what all the BIOS udpates were that were in all updates from your original BIOS. In other words, so we can see what all new BIOS versions included.

I don't think that a BIOS upgrades affects any data on your hard drive, such as MBR and so forth. At least, it shouldn't have anything to do with it. But with a new BIOS, perhaps there are new settings in there somewhere that have to be changed.

You can get the SATA controller driver from your motherboard manufacturer web site, put that on a floppy to use in XP Setup. You shouldn't require any drivers to use floppy. If even that doesn't work, maybe the floppy is turned off in the BIOS?

Worst case you may have to do a Repair install of XP. Or even flash an older BIOS back on.

Sundewzer - as Vigilante says, flashing the bios wont alter HDD info or the MBR, but it will alter the way the Mobo recognises peripherals like IDE HDD's, memory, graphics and possibly SATA if there is an entry for that etc. You need to check the Bios settings and make sure that everything is correctly set - AND make sure you have the correct Bios flash version for your Mobo .... sounds like you might not have.

Most likely in flashing the bios you have upset recognition of the SATA drivers, so will have to reload via F6 during XP install.

Vigilante - got nowhere with that SATA HDD I was troubleshooting - dead end so we're donging an IDE drive into it, use the old SATA one as a frisbee ..... weeeeeeeee
Cheers
Bazzaw

The mobo recognizes the hdd just fine, and the bios that I download was ASUS's newest bios for the A8V deluxe. I tried to use asus updater to download the bios and install it which has worked in the past but I let it run over night and nothing happened so I downloaded the file off of ASUS's website (which isn't up right now), I am not sure that I downloaded the right one though, and I don't remeber which one I downloaded. I am pretty sure that I went from ver. 1001 to 1013 though.

lol. I am still reluctant to support SATA drives until there is much better support for them. Or at least until they are as easy to use as IDE. To many bugs.

sundewzer, you might try to get the bios from the global site instead of the USA site. Which is http://support.asus.com/download/dow...Language=en-us
Just type A8V Delux in the search bar and select BIOS in the 2nd drop-down. Looks like 1013 is the latest though, so may not matter. But looks like you have the latest version. Double check that your system actually lists that THAT version is installed though. That is was successful. You may even want to flash it again with the same version just to be sure. Use the DOS flash rather than Windows flash version. Make sure your floppies are good with a scandisk on them first.

Other than that, if you think the BIOS is right and the latest version, I would pull the battery and set the CMOS clear jumper, remove power from the system and let it sit a few minutes. Then set back and boot up into CMOS. Set Fail-Safe defaults. And then from that point go through and set the options you need, such as date-time, CPU speed etc... The boot order too of course.

Now what happens when you turn it on? Does it even try to get into Windows? Does it go but then error? Does it just say no OS found?
If it actually goes into Windows to some degree and fails, it may be a driver issue. But if something happens before Windows ever comes into view, it couldn't be a driver. Drivers aren't used outside of Windows. Well, technically they are, but not in the same sence as a Windows driver.
Anyways, what happens again?

bios goes through fine but the it says that there is no boot device insert bootable media. But I fixed the problem. When it flashed the bios it reset all my setting and it had the number one hdd as the ide drive and the sata was set as num two. Once I change that win booted up just fine. Thanks for trying to help though.

Is there any way to check the running bios version from windows? I do want to check and see if the bios actualy updated. Cause the first bios screen take about 10 sec and it only use to take about 1 and I was hoping the new bios would fix that. Thanks

Didn't someone suggest boot order a while back? How easy was that?

Anyway, I think CPUZ will tell you BIOS version from windows: http://www.cpuid.org/cpuz.php
Not sure though, but it gives some other cool info.

Besides that you'll have to see just as you turn the PC on, within a few seconds, what version you have running. You can usually use the "pause" button on the keyboard to stop it so you can look. It will be one of the first lines of text after video card.

Glad it's working though!

I found current bios in system info and it did update. Yes it was quite easy but the thing is that I had changed it and then the bios boot failed and I reloaded the default setting and I didn't event think about it.*bangs head aginst desk* such a waist of time. Ohh well I won't do it again, that is for sure.

Hi,
I've got a Dell Dimension 8400 with two 400GB SATA drives originally set up as RAID MIRROR. I need to reinstal Windows XP because of some serious problems. However, when I try to do so, it tells me there is no hard disk. I press F6 and install the Intel 82801 drivers like you're supposed to but still no dice.

The BIOS appears to be configured properly.

I am able to install Win XP on other IDE drives in this machine no problem.

I have an SATA to IDE adaptor. I've thought of removing the master drive, installing it as an IDE drive using the converter and installing Win XP on it and then replacing it back into the array without the adaptor. Will that work?

Ideas, comments, advice are most welcome.

Pez,
S