# Major problem with Promise FastTrack 378 controller (under WinXP)



## Samopal (Jan 22, 2005)

Hi everyone, 
i've read almost all the stuff about S-ATA and Promise controllers in this forum but i did not find the solution for my - i think - unusual problem. I want to run 3 S-ATA drives in my PC - no RAID at all. 2 of them are at Intel controller, they work fine for year. today i wanted to add third one, so i had to enable promise controller and i set it to IDE mode in BIOS. when booting there appears S-ATA Promise FastTrack378 that recognize my third hdd correctly, but problem is in OS. it found new hw, but yellow "!" mark is on FastTrack controller and it says: "This device cannot start. (Code 10)". 

I have latest bios 1007.003 on MB Asus P4P800-E Deluxe
There is also new device recognized as unknown device appeard and i can not find drivers for it (it is connected to intel hdd controller - strange..) 

does anybody have a little hint?


----------



## blackduck30 (Sep 7, 2004)

for the promise controller , unlike the intel for non raid use you will have to install a non sata driver , promise 378ata. you will have to make a floppy with this driver on it which you should have on your original mobo cd. you can then go into your device manager under the controller with the yellow question mark and double click it and go to the driver tab and look for the update driver , click on that and point it to the floppy you made and you should be fine


----------



## Samopal (Jan 22, 2005)

blackduck30 said:


> for the promise controller , unlike the intel for non raid use you will have to install a non sata driver , promise 378ata. you will have to make a floppy with this driver on it which you should have on your original mobo cd. you can then go into your device manager under the controller with the yellow question mark and double click it and go to the driver tab and look for the update driver , click on that and point it to the floppy you made and you should be fine


hmm, thanx for quick answer, but i am afraid that it will not work because: 
1, all 3 S-ATA hdd's are passive, OS is on 4th, so I only need drivers for running OS, not for installing OS right on it. 
2, i do not have floppy drive :sayno: 
3, i tried to run 3 S-ATA hdd's before a year or so and installed fasttrack driver as you wrote here and it worked! (drivers loaded from original mobo CD)

now when i try to uninstall it and then rediscover by OS then I browse for right drivers and it act as it is assigning them to device... but at the end the error message is written as i wrote before...


----------



## Samopal (Jan 22, 2005)

so, i have been searching for a solution all this morning and i found one but not very "right" one: Promise controller has two operation modes IDE and RAID. when turned to IDE WinXP can not work with it at all but when i try to run it in RAID mode, everything seems to be alright. but! i have only one hdd and don't want to operate RAID array so i made stripping RAID 0 array of 1 disk (which i never though it is possible). but it works now. does anybody have an idea of RAID 0 working on single hdd? or it is only a fake from controller side and hdd is really working as normal IDE disk... confused


----------

