Promise S-ATA / Intel ICH5 S-ATA

Question

Hi
After getting some good advice from users in these forums, I setup my two Maxtor ATA133 hard drives on IDE3 in a 'non-RAID configuration' and it worked fine, although I did have a few problems after updated the Promise S-ATA driver with the wrong driver.
Q:  With reference to actual S-ATA drives, I have not yet bought any because there appears to be some problems with some makes of S-ATA drives but, can I assume that if I connect two S-ATA drives to the Promise SER3 and SER4, then like my ATA133 drives, the S-ATA drive will also work in a 'non-RAID configuration using the same WinXP Promise S-ATA drivers that I installed for the ATA133 drives?
Q:  I would really like to use the Intel S-ATA ports because I have read that they are preferable to the Promise S-ATA ports.  Can I connect two S-ATA drives to SER1 and SER2 in a 'Non-RAID' configuration' and if so, what is the correct method for doing this and what drivers should be used?
Q:  I know that Maxtor have some problems with their early S-ATA drives (something to do with BP3, and BP4 extra - what is this and where should I look for this on the drive?) but can anyone recommend any makes of S-ATA drives  that they have used without problems on the 875P boards - make and model numbers please.
BTW - When is BIOS v1.9 due?
Regards
Brave01Heart

Answer 1

Hi to all who gave me advice for setting up two S-ATA drives on the Intel ICH5R controller with "NO" RAID.
Well, I got my two "NEW" S-ATA drives this afternoon and after following the advice given by several users in this thread, I'm having ptoblems trying to install Windows XP and I'm getting messages like "missing operating system", "Invalid system disk, (when XP CD is in CD drive) replace the disk and press any key", so I need some help please.
Ok, I setup the BIOS settings in Integrated Perpherals/On-Chip IDE Configuration to:
Mode:  NATIVE
ATA Configuration:  S-ATA Only
Keep S-ATA Enabled:  YES
Keep P-ATA Enabled:  YES
P-ATA Channel Selection:  BOTH
Configure S-ATA as RAID:  NO
I then switched off the computer and connected my two Seagate S-ATA drives
(ST380013AS 7200.7 80GB on SER1 & ST3120026AS 7200.7 120GB on SER2).
I turned on computer and drives were shown on POST screen as "Third IDE Master (80GB) and 4th IDE Master (120GB).  I then entered BIOS to check if they were shown and they were and I selected the "ST380013AS 7200.7 80GB drive" as my 3rd boot device with the CD as my first boot device and the floppy as my second.
BOTH drives were already set to "AUTO", but the label on the physical drives states that you should choose "AUTO" and  enable "LARGE BLOCK ADDRESSING (LBA), but I could not see an option for this.  I did not get any software with the disk but the drive label states that you chould use "Disc Wizard" but I did not have this so I used an updated Boot Floppy that works with drives up to 137GB.  I FDISK'd the 80GB drive and formatted it to FAT32 (although I would not normally do this because XP setup always finds my new partitioned ATA133 drives and starts setup and then formats it).
Note:  During format, the drive was shown as "Formatting 10,780.56M" and for an 80GB drive, this did not seem right but after formatting, it showed as 76,297,91MB total disk space.  FDISK showed the drive as 76,317MBytes.
Also in the BIOS, the 80GB drive is shown with "CYLINDERS:38309", "HEADS:16", SECTORS:255", MAXIMUM CAPACITY:80GB and "WRITE PRECOMPENSATION:(nothing was shown for this - what is this and should there be a reading for it)?
I then restarted the computer with the XP CD in the Master CD drive and the cd was found and showed "Press any key to continue......" but this was quickly followed by "Invalid System Disk - Replace the disk and press any key".
I tried this many times but always get the same message.  Can anyone who has setup S-ATA drives on ICH5R with "no RAID" and then installed a fresh copy of XP, please help, or anyone who can help with this, I would be very grateful.
Regards
Brave01Heart