Trying to add SATA HDD to computer using VIA RAID Controller

[Click Beetle DX]

Hello, all.

I wish to add a second, new HDD to my system (a Compaq 5WV270). Here's the hardware I bought to do it with:

- VIA RAID Controller 3249 PCI card

- Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB HDD

- Standard power cable converter to SATA

- SATA cable

I plugged in the PCI card and connected it to the HDD. I then connected the HDD to the SATA power plug, and secured it inside the HDD bay.

When I powered on the machine, Windows 98SE detected the VIA RAID Controller card and successfully installed the drivers from the CD-ROM drive. Later on when I reset the machine, I noticed the VIA card is detected and enabled in the BIOS, on IRQ5.

...but that's it. There's no mention of the HDD anywhere and I can't seem to access it with FDISK or by any other means.

Apparently I'm missing something so I figured I'd better post here for some help. Any info will be much appreciated, thank you.

[dencorso]

Apparently I'm missing something

Sure. This.

[Click Beetle DX]

Apparently I'm missing something

Sure. This.

Thank you for the link. I have followed the instructions found on the page, however my system still does not seem to detect the drive. Is there anything else I can try? Thanks.

[SomeGuy]

As far as I can tell, your "VIA RAID Controller 3249 PCI card" is VIA 6421 SATA/IDE raid based card.

It sounds like the machine is not initializing the BIOS on the SATA card. (If you can access the drive from within windows it is not a speed detection issue)

As long as at least one drive is attached you should see some VIA copyright info and a list of 4 lines just after BIOS POST listing each port on the card and what drive is attached to them if any. If you do not see that then the drive will not be accessible from real-mode DOS and can not be used as a boot device - yet it may be accessible from inside Windows with the SATA driver loaded. (The computer BIOS showing that an interrupt is assigned is not specifically relevant)

Unfortunately, some of these VIA SATA cards ship with NO bios or defective bioses. There is little or no quality control on components like these these days.

Things to try:

Double check to see if that list of SATA/IDE drives attached to the controller card is appearing after the POST or not. On a Compaq you may have to dismiss the BIOS logo screen to see everything that is going on.

Visibly check the card. There should be two black chips - the VIA controller and a smaller Flash bios chip, usually covered by a sticker. If your card only has the one VIA chip then you have been ripped off.

If it does have both chips then:

Check your BIOS setup to see if there are any options for permitting or disabling PCI card BIOS or firmware. Some BIOSes need to be told to do that.

Try attaching some other device like a SATA DVD drive or an IDE drive to the IDE port on the card to see if that makes any difference.

Try running the 5.2 bios update located here: http://www.rosewill.com/products/d_983/productDetail.htm (It is intended for Rosewill cards but they all use exactly the same bios, and works fine on other cards like Syba - most VIA SATA cards ship with an older 4.x bios anyway and this gets rid of a dumb warning about installing Linux). If it doesn't see a flash bios that either means the flash bios on the card is defective or a model it doesn't recognize.

If you can, you might try the card on another computer. If you do need to get a different VIA 6421 card, the PPA or Rosewill brand seems like solid cards, Syba is OK and usually has a header for an activity LED. Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify if a model of card has a proper bootable bios before purchasing, it is trial and error.

Try running FDISK from inside Windows (a command prompt window) instead of real-mode DOS. Since windows recognized the card, it might be accessible from inside Windows.

Actually, if you are happy just running it as a secondary storage drive that can not be booted or accessed from DOS, you can run FDISK and format inside Windows 9x to partition the drive. Oh, and make sure you have FDISK update if you use that.

Hope this helps at least a little.

[Click Beetle DX]

Thanks, SomeGuy, the information you provided was quite helpful. I decided to dump the VIA card altogether and go with one by HighPoint Technologies. When I plugged this new HighPoint card into my machine and hooked the SATA HDD to it, the card's BIOS came up immediately upon powering on my machine, and it pulled up the 500GB HDD no problem. So that's the first hurdle cleared, at least.

The problem is, I am quite a bit over my head here, having never before dealt with any SATA device before...

My computer's BIOS doesn't pick up on the new SATA HDD at all, and the BIOS of the HighPoint card loads in before the computer's BIOS, to take total control of the boot process. This means that the HighPoint card assigns the new 500GB HDD the drive letter C, and forces it to be the only HDD the computer tries to boot from. Certainly I can pop in my Win98SE CD-ROM to boot to a DOS prompt. And then, I can use my updated version of FDISK (stored on my regular HDD) to init the new drive and get it set up for the full 500GB.

But I DO NOT WANT the 500GB drive to be my C drive. I wish to keep booting from the HDD that came with the computer, with it remaining as the C drive, and have the new drive set up as a secondary.

I am probably missing something very simple. At least I hope that's the case. If you (or anyone else here) can help me get that drive switched over from the C (primary) drive, that would save me a real headache. I don't do a lot on the hardware side, so much of this is all new to me.

Thanks.

[rloew]

Thanks, SomeGuy, the information you provided was quite helpful. I decided to dump the VIA card altogether and go with one by HighPoint Technologies. When I plugged this new HighPoint card into my machine and hooked the SATA HDD to it, the card's BIOS came up immediately upon powering on my machine, and it pulled up the 500GB HDD no problem. So that's the first hurdle cleared, at least.

The problem is, I am quite a bit over my head here, having never before dealt with any SATA device before...

My computer's BIOS doesn't pick up on the new SATA HDD at all, and the BIOS of the HighPoint card loads in before the computer's BIOS, to take total control of the boot process. This means that the HighPoint card assigns the new 500GB HDD the drive letter C, and forces it to be the only HDD the computer tries to boot from. Certainly I can pop in my Win98SE CD-ROM to boot to a DOS prompt. And then, I can use my updated version of FDISK (stored on my regular HDD) to init the new drive and get it set up for the full 500GB.

But I DO NOT WANT the 500GB drive to be my C drive. I wish to keep booting from the HDD that came with the computer, with it remaining as the C drive, and have the new drive set up as a secondary.

I am probably missing something very simple. At least I hope that's the case. If you (or anyone else here) can help me get that drive switched over from the C (primary) drive, that would save me a real headache. I don't do a lot on the hardware side, so much of this is all new to me.

Thanks.

Check your Hard Disk Boot Priority Setting in your BIOS. Be sure that your Motherboard Connected Hard Disk comes before any Add-In Card.

What Highpoint Card are you using? Some are not compatable with Windows 9x.

[Click Beetle DX]

Check your Hard Disk Boot Priority Setting in your BIOS. Be sure that your Motherboard Connected Hard Disk comes before any Add-In Card.

I don't have that option in my computer's BIOS. In the boot process menu, it only allows me to choose between the HDD that shipped with the computer, the CD-ROM drive and the floppy drive. There's nothing in there regarding add-in cards being selected as boot devices. And also, as I said, the 500GB HDD I connected to the HighPoint card is not detected by my computer's BIOS; only by the BIOS of the card itself.

Since the HighPoint card BIOS comes up before my computer's BIOS does, it is actually in control of the boot process - and its configuration menu does not let me do anything about changing the boot drive away from the 500GB SATA drive that's connected to it.

What Highpoint Card are you using?

It's a RocketRAID 1720.

[dencorso]

Well you can boot it to true DOS and use grub4dos to cause it to subsequently boot from your old HDD.

[Click Beetle DX]

Well you can boot it to true DOS and use grub4dos to cause it to subsequently boot from your old HDD.

But won't my old HDD still technically be the D drive? That will mess up all my settings and installed programs, as they are set up for drive C.

[jaclaz]

Well you can boot it to true DOS and use grub4dos to cause it to subsequently boot from your old HDD.

But won't my old HDD still technically be the D drive? That will mess up all my settings and installed programs, as they are set up for drive C.

Not necessarily.

Besides using grub4dos for exchanging disks (which should be enough in itself) you may want to try using Letter assigner:

jaclaz

[dencorso]

I do it in my main machine everyday. Grub4dos will exchange the disks all right and C: will be assigned to the HDD whence it booted last (so your old HDD bootable partition will end up as C:). That said, I leave you in the very capable hands of jaclaz, who is the one from whom I first learned about grub4dos.

[jaclaz]

I do it in my main machine everyday. Grub4dos will exchange the disks all right and C: will be assigned to the HDD whence it booted last (so your old HDD bootable partition will end up as C:).

Yes, but we have to test if it works with RAID Highpoint whatever (or have you the same kind of card?)

That said, I leave you in the very capable hands of jaclaz, who is the one from whom I first learned about grub4dos.

Thanks , but be aware that this may sound as an "argumentum ad verecundiam" :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

jaclaz

[dencorso]

I do it in my main machine everyday. Grub4dos will exchange the disks all right and C: will be assigned to the HDD whence it booted last (so your old HDD bootable partition will end up as C:).

Yes, but we have to test if it works with RAID Highpoint whatever (or have you the same kind of card?)

True enough (and no, I don't have that kind of card... But if I did we'd loose more than half the fun, wouldn't we?).

That said, I leave you in the very capable hands of jaclaz, who is the one from whom I first learned about grub4dos.

Thanks , but be aware that this may sound as an "argumentum ad verecundiam" :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

Well, according to the Wikipedia, a good "argumentum ad verecundiam" must meet at least two conditions:

1.The authority is a legitimate expert on the subject.

2.A consensus exists among legitimate experts on the matter under discussion.

While 1. is certaily true, 2. is complicated...

On the matters we deal here usually there may even be perhaps local consensuses, but anything near universal consensus is a unattainable myth, to say the least.

But, solving the problem, which I'm confident will be solved, will certaily validate my argument, so I'm confident I'm safe.

[Click Beetle DX]

I do it in my main machine everyday. Grub4dos will exchange the disks all right and C: will be assigned to the HDD whence it booted last (so your old HDD bootable partition will end up as C:).

What options / switches need to be specified in order to accomplish this?

[dencorso]

OK. Do the following:

0. Make the SATA HDD bootable to DOS 7.10 (the one in Win 98)

1. Download this version of grub4dos-0.4.4-2009-10-16.zip and extract just grub.exe from it to the root directory of the SATA HDD bootable partition.

2. Create a text file in the root directory of the SATA HDD bootable partition containing the following:

default 0

timeout 0

title WINDOWS XP SP3

map (hd0) (hd1)

map (hd1) (hd0)

map --hook

rootnoverify (hd0,0)

chainloader (hd0,0)+1

and rename it to menu.lst.

3. Reboot.

4. When you get the DOS prompt, type grub and hit <enter>.

...

If the machine then boots from your old HDD, just like it used to, then all that remains is to automate it.

If not, then it's time to start experimenting. This is one of the many ways it might be accomplished using grub4dos.

Of course, jaclaz would prefer another, perhaps simpler way. There're many.

There's also an online manual for it which is good enough for you to get the gist of it: Grub4dos Guide.

You might also like to read this recent thread.

Whatever happens, do keep us posted.