# K8S-MX - Windows setup won't recognize SATA drives



## akajoey (May 10, 2005)

Asus K8S-MX motherboard
1GB RAM
Radeon 9800XT
AMD Athlon 3200+
2 Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA drives

I assembled this system myself, intending to use both 80gb drives in a RAID 1 configuration. Everything is installed, it boots fine, sees both drives initially during startup. When I try to install Windows XP it tells me it does not see a hard drive. I read up as much as I could find it looks like I need to install a driver during setup (hitting F6 and then specifying the driver). For the life of me I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong. I found what I thought was the correct driver, put it on a floppy and hit F6 during setup but got an error message. (Sorry I can't replicate it right now since I'm not near the machine). Asus site is not very helpful, neither is the manual or the disk that came with it. 

I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction - any help is greatly appreciated. 

Thanks,
Andrew


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## clintfan (Sep 4, 2003)

Hi akajoey, and welcome to the forum!

You may have solved this by now, but here goes...

1. You will need to enable some stuff in the BIOS, perhaps you have already done this. I think on the Main screen you should set Onboard PCI S-ATA Controller= RAID by Rom; and set Boot- Boot Device Priority to CD- Floppy- <SiS RAID>. Hit F10 to save.

2. You do need to create the RAID1 array ahead-of-time, before beginning the install. Power up, and during the POST, you press CTRL+S at the appropriate time, to enter the SiS RAID BIOS Setting Utility. See section 3.3.2 of your mobo manual for the "Creating RAID 1" procedure.

3. I think you also need both the "SiS RAID Driver Package Version 3.60 for floppy image". The web info says to "copy all the files and folders into floppy", but I think you should just run Winzip, extracting all files onto A: as the target; this should form the necessary folder structure (be sure to checkbox "use folder names").

4. Start XP Setup and press F6 as you did. Then you have to wait 2-3 minutes until it comes to the blue screen that says nothing was found. Look carefully at the bottom of the screen; it should say "S= Specify Additional Device". Press S, this should take you to the dialog to load the driver from floppy. The device you want to select will be in the file 965_965L\RAID\SiSRaid2.INF; select the device named ="SiS 180 RAID Controller" (or it might come up as 182, I'm not sure).

5. I hope this will get you past your trouble spot.

6. Later you will also need to install the full driver, along with all the other SiS drivers. 

-clintfan


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