What am i doing wrong?

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m-k

New user

2 posts
Posted: 06/01/2009 11:01 AM

Welcome everyone :)

i have purchased a prebuilt PC a while ago. the specs are;
Core2Duo E8400 3.0
gibabyte GA-EP45-DS3R motherboard
4 GB RAM
WD 3.5" 500GD HDD x 2 - SATA RAID connection
nVidia GeForce 9800GT 512mb
LG DVD - IDE connection
Pioneer DVD - SATA connection
Microsoft Vista Premium 32bit

the setup really satisfied my needs and worked OK.

after a while i decided to add extra HDD for more storage making it 1.5TB setup. all 3 drives are internal 3.5" HDD's - all OK

then i wanted to try and use this system with 3 different Operating Systems. Im not a fan of dual booting and so on so i decided on purchasing extra HDD but this time with smaller capacity and REMOVABLE - i went for SAMSUNG 300GB 2.5" HDD's (3 in total) with a Thermatake MAX4 removable rack (here: http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?C=1403&ID=1826 )

the HDD are connected as such: Sata0 500Gb with Vista, SATA1 Pioneer DVD, SATA2 and SATA3 2.5' removable drives inside Thermaltake Max4 Rack, Sata4 500GB HDD, Sata5 500Gb HDD.

i disconnected all Sata drives except for Sata2 and 3 and rebooted the PC with my old copy of Windows XP inside the DVD drive... the setup did start up and proceeded for approximately 10 minutes but then it stopped with eror message saying the system could not locate any HDD's :(

i attempted to install Linux Ubuntu 8.10 also...same issue.

i then moved the connections to Sata0 and sata1 = same error message both with installation of WinXP and U8.10 :(

anyone can advise if i can succeed in installing my OS's on the removable drives or this system is only Vista friendly ?

Thank you in advance..
MK

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GoughLui

I plug into everything like USB.

New user

112 posts
Posted: 08/01/2009 11:01 PM

Well, the condition of not being able to find any Hard Drives is more likely than not an issue with drivers and support for your RAID SATA controller. Given that you have a rather new motherboard - this might be the case because the controller may be newer than the hardware support afforded by Ubuntu and Windows XP.

Please make sure your removable racks are installed correctly. If you enter the BIOS on bootup and can see your drives listed - then they have been detected okay, and the next issue is to get the operating system to detect it.

On the motherboard CD or in the motherboard box, there may be a floppy disk or a floppy disk maker with the RAID Driver Disk Software on it. Search your CD-ROM. On bootup of the XP Install, you will see something like "Press F8 if you need to load support software for your RAID Controller" or something similar - Press F8 with the floppy disk in and it should be able to find it. I'm not sure if it supports CD's or USB's as I haven't done it in a while - but after it locates and loads your driver, everything should be sweet.

Because you're using RAID on your system (for your other drives), I would be very careful about the controller and changing any settings as they may totally wreck your array. The other alternative for NON RAID USERS is to see if there is a BIOS setting for the SATA mode which you can change to Compatible instead of Native, install your OS, install your drivers for the SATA and then revert it back to Native. Users of RAID are NOT RECOMMENDED TO TOUCH THIS SETTING.

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