875P NEO - Strange problem with SATA non RAID on Promise 20378

Question

Hello,
After replacing an IDE harddisk suddenly my S-ATA drive connected to the Promise 387 controller can not be found anymore.
When booting it says: No devices found, BIOS not installed. I got the the advice to disable S-ATA in the BIOS, but then no S-ATA drive will work ofcourse.
So here is my situation:
- MSI 875P Neo-FISR (PCB 2.0) mainboard with A6758 BIOS version
BIOS settings:
Integrated Peripherals:
- On board Promise IDE = as S-ATA
On Chip IDE configuration:
- P-ATA only
- S-ATA keep enabled = NO (wouldn't know what this means)
- P-ATA channel selection = Both (if set otherwise it will not recognize the second IDE
controller, strange!)
- S-ATA ports defintion: P0-4th/ P1-3rd (standard setting)
- Config as RAID = NO
Also I have the Promise 1.0.1.29 drivers installed within XP, I know that MSI says 378_55 is the latest, but when installing a clean XP these drivers did not work at all, so I installed the old ones.Within XP it is recognized btw as being a "WinXP Promise SATA378 IDE controller"
What I am wondering now is:
Is it true the Promise controll controls the 3rd IDE controller as well as the S-ATA HDD? And if so can someone please tell what would be the correct settings in the BIOS when having 2 IDE HDD's connnected to the third IDE controller and 1 S-ATA disk on the Promise controller? Because the strange thing only 1 IDE HDD is recognized by XP, the other IDE HDD and S-ATA not.
Ok, I hope I was a little bit clear, I'm really desperate , so I hope you can help me out !!

Answer 1

Not sure what the problem is.
Like I said, all the settings in Integrated Peripherals>>On-Chip IDE Config should only affect the Intel controller(IDE1&2,Serial1&2)
The only interaction you have with the Promise controller(IDE3,Serial3&4) is through Integrated Peripherals>>Promise Controller(As SATA, As Raid, Disabled). You can also select a drive connected to the Promise as a boot device from Bios>>Advanced Features>>Boot Device Select.
I would take a step back and start over a little more slowly.
My assumption so far is that you have WinXP installed on a drive on the Intel controller and that it is booting/functioning properly.
You are trying to install 2 IDE and 1 SATA drives on the Promise controller.
1- In Device Manager, right-click on the Promise 378 controller and select uninstall. If you know for sure that the "Raid Consolel SCSI Processor Device" is from a driver you installed for the Promise controller, uninstall that too. Otherwise leave it alone.
2- Shutdown/Unplug power and disconnect all 3 drives from the Promise controller.
3- Plugin power/Boot to the Bios and set the Promise controller to "disabled". Also make sure Intel "On-Chip IDE Config" menu "Config SATA As Raid" option is set to "NO"
4- Save and reboot to WinXP. There should be no Bios errors and the Promise entries in Device Manager should be gone.
5- Shutdown/Unplug Power and reconnect 1 drive(the SATA to Serial3 for simplicity) Power + data cables!
6- Plugin power/boot to Bios and set Promise controller to "As SATA"
7- Save and reboot. You should see the drive name briefly after the initial post screen if you've disabled the MSI splash screen.
8- WinXP should say something about finding a new SCSI device. If not just see if it's in Device manager and right-click>>"Install Drivers" and point it to the driver folder from before and install the "WinXP Promise SATA378 (tm) IDE Controller Driver". Not the Fastrack ones for raid.
9- Now after another reboot if the SATA drive isn't visible from Windows Explorer, try the diskmgmt.msc utility again.
10- If all this works, try adding 1 of the IDE drives by shutting down again, installing the HDD and checking the Disk Manager. If the drives are already partitioned/formatted you wouldn't need to use Disk Manager. Repeat with the 3rd drive.
If this doesn't work, let me know which step you got to and the problem encountered.