# Need help: Gigabyte MB not seeing HDs



## jptex (Feb 19, 2005)

New Gigabyte MB GA-8I915P Duo Pro  is driving me batty and I wonder if anyone has experience solving my problem - or telling me there's not a solution. 

The MB has SATA connections, but I'm using 4 ATA drives which worked fine with my old Soyo board. The Gigabyte board has three IDE channels, so I figured it would allow me to use the drives I have and upgrade to SATA later.

After several sidetracks and a reinstall I got XP Pro to run on the C: drive. Everything works normally, but for some reason I cannot see or access my other 3 HDs (data drives). During POST all are listed, and they show in BIOS boot drive selection. But once XP is running, I see only the C: drive and my DVD-R drive. 

Gigabyte tech help tells me all optical drives must be on IDE1 and the HDs on IDE2 and IDE3. That works fine since I can choose any of the HDs as boot drive. Tech help's other help was in installing RAID for the IDE drives. I have succeeded in that, but I don't want the drives in a RAID configuration -- I would like to be able to access them directly from any file manager. Plus, the RAID controller wants to wipe at least some of the drives, and I have data on them not to lose. 

I have about come to the conclusion that this board won't allow me to access the drives as I have with every other motherboard I've owned, unless they are in a RAID. 

Oh, yes, a complicating installation factor is that the CD that came with the MB won't run in my Internet Explorer because of active-x. When I enable active-x, IE shuts down. Not enabled, it won't run the CD. So I've installed drivers by manually transferring them to an accessible location. That probably slowed my ability to get everyting configured, but all now seems well except - I can't see the HDs!

Has anyone had similar experience? Any suggestions?


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## riley50 (Jan 30, 2005)

hi i have just started a new build based on a GA-81915P Duo Pro and also have problems with ide HDD. At the moment the bios is 'seeing' whatever is on IDE1 and I cannot get it to 'see' IDE2 or 3. Where is your c: drive - on IDE1? I do not have a sata drive so cannot deploy that. I do not want to have a RAID configuration.
The manual talks of up to 6 HDD - do you know if that includes CDROMs or does it really mean HDD?
Have you used the azalea header?
Did you notice the F1 1394 header is non-standard - a converter is due next week.
cheers


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## Tryand (Mar 4, 2005)

Damm, same problem i posted about it seems, cept i cant install windows at all.

Mobo will only detect whats on ide 1, even though it will read the cd roms on ide2, when i get to the install part of setup (using bootdiscs) it says it cant find a cdrom drive  If i put cdroms into ide 1, i can boot from cd but same spot it says it cant find a harddrive >_<

Same mobo GA-81914P Duo (Pro)-A.


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## riley50 (Jan 30, 2005)

hi Tryand thats exactly my problem. there must be a solution..!!!!
cannot phone tech support until Monday........


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## jptex (Feb 19, 2005)

*reply for Tryand & riley50*

Hi, guys! I'm not glad you're having trouble, but I am relieved that I'm not the only soul in Gigabyte land with this don't-see-the-drives problem. I'll outline what I think  I've learned in hopes it will give you additional things to try. 

This is long, long. But I'm posting it because I would have loved to have had as much information when I started this project.

Riley50 -- first, to your direct questions, as best as I can answer.

* As detailed farther down but hard to mine out of there, my C: drive is on IDE2. It works on IDE1, but optical drives are usable only on IDE1, and I have 2 of them. You need to make sure BIOS settings have your C: drive as the boot drive (details far below).

* The 6 IDE devices include optical drives as well as HDs. With my four drives and CDR and DVDR drives, that's six.

* Neither do I want to have a raid array.

* Yes, I have connected to the Azalea header and it works fine.

* And yes, I noticed one of the 1394 headers is different. Thanks for that information.

Tryand -- I don't know if there's anything here that might help. I was able to get my system to boot, but only after I reinstalled XP (Pro). It may be that you haven't hit on the right combination of right-drive on the right controller yet. Maybe something that follows will help. On the other hand, another poster in this forum, Kennedy1006, has a problem that sounds like yours. He has had a lot of responses. If you can't find his thread, whistle.

Now for the details, which are only slightly shorter than Moses and the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. 

I am 3 weeks into this problem and it's still not solved. I have four IDE hard drives carried over from my old system (Soyo), plus a CD-R drive and a DVD-R drive. I, too, read the motherboard would handle 6 IDE drives in addition to the SATA connections, and that was a major reason I bought it. I learned from Gigabyte tech support the optical drives must be connected to IDE1  (the red header). That left me with 2 IDE channels, enough for my 4 HDs. I connected my C: drive as the primary on IDE2 and the other three to IDE2 secondary and IDE3 primary and secondary. 

At first I couldn't get the machine to boot. It kept restarting somewhere in the boot sequence, sometimes as far as the Windows black screen with the three sliding bars. I changed the configuration to simply one optical drive and the C: drive on IDE1. With that, I was able to reinstall Windows (XP Pro) without losing data or settings. Then I could put the C: drive on either connector IDE1 or IDE2 and the system would boot. I did have to go into BIOS every time after rearranging drives and make sure the boot HD was selected as the boot drive. I had all drives set on Cable Select, which Gigabyte tech support later said, "wrong, you have to set Master and Slave on each IDE channel." I tried it both ways and don't find any difference, but you might keep that in mind. (Surely a board this new supports CS!)

Oh, one other thing I did was buy and install a SATA HD, mainly to see if the system would recognize another drive. It does without problem. I formatted that drive and now am using it as my data drive until I can get to the three missing ones (all data drives). 

The infuriating thing is that all drives display during POST. The optical drives on IDE1 and the SATA controllers display on the first POST screen, right after the memory check. (In case they scroll by too fast, you can with a little practice hit Pause and the boot process will freeze while you read details. You probably know this, so excuse me for saying it. Hit another key to resume booting.) My four drives on IDE2 and IDE 3 show when the boot sequence scans the VIA Raid controller for drives on it. You install the VIA Raid software (controlling IDEs 2 and 3) from the CD.

Side note of a different difficulty: The CD that came with the motherboard will not run on my machine. It opens in Internet Explorer and immediately warns of Active-X controls, asking if I want to enable active-x. If I say yes, IE shuts down with one of those warnings that something serious has gone wrong and asking if I want to send a report to Microsoft. If I do send it, the response is that active-x is dangerous and I should not activate active-x controls. If I say no to active-x, the CD won't open. Either way, I can't use the CD directly. In a series of steps, as I learned what drivers or files were needed, I went in and got files from the CD using my wife's Macintosh and saved them on a floppy. Then I would boot from the Windows installation disk, select F6, get to the floppy and install those drivers. That was an exercise in frustration because several times Windows said "can't find file ____ needed." In every case the file was in a CD subdirectory I had not copied. Finally I put every file on the floppy without directories and got them installed. But I still don't know if I got everything needed. Gigabyte had no help suggestions for the CD problem other than "order another one from Customer Service." (Guess what. I don't want another CD like the original.)

Once the VIA Raid program was installed and working, I could find all four IDE drives (plus the SATA drive) in Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management. The three missing drives showed in the bottom half of the window (where you normally can manage partitions, etc.). But each showed "unallocated," giving no indication of formatting or data or partitions. And, sure enough, in the top half of that window, only the C: drive and SATA drive showed. I noticed below that each HD was classified as either "Basic" or "Dynamic." (I had to do a search and read up on them.) The new SATA drive was "Dynamic," all the others including the C: drive, "Basic." Wondering if that would make a difference, I converted one of the missing IDE drives to Dynamic, but it made no difference.

So, though my system shows the missing drives during POST and in Disk Management, those drives do not show in "My Computer" or in "Windows Explorer" or any other file manager. 

I haven't even mentioned BIOS settings, which could take another discourse as long as this one already is. One thing I learned is that in this BIOS, hitting "Ctrl-F1" at the main BIOS screen expands some of the settings that display in various categories. Let me see if I remember settings I finally wound up with. 

Under Standard CMOS Features you should see a line for each HD controller position (if you've done Ctrl-F1 at the main screen). It will tell if a HD is detected at each. If it doesn't show one, there's not much to do unless you want to try AutoDetect at each position. Didn't help for me.

Other Main Menu Selections:

Ain't it aggravatin' how manuals these days are written? If you find "DX Wheezletoot Enable/Disable" setting, the manual has a gem like "This allows you to select Enable or Disable for the DX Wheezletoot." Grrrr....)

Advanced BIOS Features 

The first selection is important -- Hard Disk Boot Priority. Open it and you should see a list of drives that can be chosen as the boot drive. If your C: drive is not at the top, get it there. 

Also here you specify what order you want the machine to look for boot devices among HDs, floppy and CD. (This no doubt is elementary for you, but I'm including in case. Again, forgive me for overtelling. No disrespect meant.) Personally, I like the order of Floppy, CD and then HD. That way if I want to boot from something other than the HD, I don't have to reset anything going in. Your mileage may be different.

CPU Hyper Threading, to be set based on the CPU you have.

"Limit CPUID...." The manual says to disable this for XP.

Integrated Peripherals 

Gettin' serious here.

These get complicated because some control whether others can be selected or not. Plus, it's not clear to me which RAID is which, being there's one for the SATA controllers and another for the IDE controllers.

On my system, "On-Chip Primary PCI IDE" cannot be changed.

SATA RAID Mode: I've tried all three selections and don't remember what they do. I think mine is set on SATA. But it may be set to Disabled. (Even if you have a RAID enabled, it won't do anything to your drives unless you create an Array. I think.)

On-Chip SATA Mode: I've tried every setting, I think, without any giving me access to my data drives. 

Skipping some...

Onboard H/W RAID: Tech Help said to Enable it.

Other options, in this section and others, are pretty standard even from earlier days. Or they are fairly self-explanatory. I think.

If you've made changes, be sure to SAVE and exit. We don't want to have to go through it again. (Though it is becoming pretty familiar by now, he said sadly.)

My last contact with Gigabyte Tech Support was a phone call last Tuesday, after e-mail Tech Support gave up and said phone California. (I didn't know they had stateside help available.) The lady I talked to was nice and knowledgable, but she didn't have any advice to offer that helped. She is the one who said I couldn't use Cable Select, and I tried Master and Slave settings without seeing any changes. 

The one thing she said that may apply is that I have to format my other drives from the current OS on my C: drive. If they were formatted with an "old" Windows, she said, the OS won't communicate with them. I'm about 50-50 on that suggestion, a more-believing ratio than earlier, primarily because it has never applied before as far as I can remember (going back to Windows 3 and, gasp!, DOS). 

That could apply because XP that is now working is later than the one on my XP installation disk. SP2 and a few dozen other updates could make it a different animal. Anyone have comments on that, in case you've persevered this far?


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## riley50 (Jan 30, 2005)

wow some reply! many thanks will need to ponder on it all. I have only put up one dvd writer on ide1 which works fine. I have possibly an unformatted hdd as master on ide2 (i am/was going to do a clean windows install). The hdd is seen in boot up by the VIA VT6410 RAID routine and also by FDISK (after a boot into a floppy). However the bios does not list it at all - i am set to SATA Mode 'enhanced' and H/W RAID enabled.
If I F6 into the RAID screen the hdd is listed but I have no cursor and can do nothing except exit.

I think I shall look for another hdd, format it and try it as ide2 slave and see what happens.

Perhaps after their new year festivities tech support will be able to explain!

should you need it the 'firewire converter' is part no. 12CR1-1UB005-50 and should be in Dabs by end of next week (Gigabyte sales says).

will stay in touch.


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## Tryand (Mar 4, 2005)

Im having same prob riley, dunno if its your hd or not.

When i tab into the raid thing i cant do anything eitehr, even if the hd is listed there, then at windows install, cant find hd...

:upset:


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## jptex (Feb 19, 2005)

*one more thought for riley50*

You probably already have tried it, but I think I had my C: drive as the slave on IDE1, with the DVD-writer as master, when I finally was able to reinstall XP. For clarification in case I missed mentioning it, my C: drive already had XP Pro installed along with programs. As mentioned, XP Install said at some early point that I would not lose my files and settings. I was dubious but went ahead and was pleasantly surprised when everything came up just like they were before. Minus ALL the XP updates, of course, which I had to re-do. 

I can't imagine why you're not able to see the boot drive. But of course I can't understand why my system won't show the data drives. Something definitely is different from the "old" days -- 3 weeks ago.

Since you don't have any SATA drives, you might try changing SATA mode to Combined and/or Disable and see if anything comes up different. But you've probably already tried that, too. The difference could be trying those settings with HD connected to IDE1.


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## riley50 (Jan 30, 2005)

This is absurd! I posted a simple question to gigabyte tech support which they have been 'processing' for the past two days. This page is not available today so no idea if there is an answer! The FAQ selection is now working with a set of irrelevant (to us) questions. The lone tech support man in uk is busy....
I did find that the ich6r controller chip is designed to control up to 6 sata channels.
In desparation I have now rebuilt my pc a la jptex - cdrom as master and hdd as slave on ide1. Now installing windows xp (i hope).
Just to confirm are we saying that none of us can use an hdd on either ide2 or 3? 
Also if we put a sata (non raid) drive on any of those connectors it will be seen by bios and ultimately windows?
Can we boot from it?
Guess this is the fall back. This is an expense I was trying to avoid!
What of sata/ide converters (£25-30)?
Dxxn them!!


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## crazijoe (Oct 19, 2004)

I know how all you guys feel. I just upgraded my home server from a P4P8X to an Intel D925XCVK. I have 3 IDE drives I use as part of the file server. I didn't have the luxury of more than 1 IDE connections on this new board. I ended up buying a PCI IDE controller card for $20US to hook my drives to. That was the best $20 I ever spent.


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## jptex (Feb 19, 2005)

riley50 said:


> This is absurd! I posted a simple question to gigabyte tech support which they have been 'processing' for the past two days.
> [snip]
> Just to confirm are we saying that none of us can use an hdd on either ide2 or 3?
> Also if we put a sata (non raid) drive on any of those connectors it will be seen by bios and ultimately windows?
> ...


Unfortunately you are having the same experience with web tech support as I. And when you get an answer, it's 50-50 that it will be so brief and off-point as to be unusable. I was about to give you the California phone number for tech support (I think they must have one person there, also). But I see you're apparently in UK.

Clarifications: I have been able to see my C: drive on IDE2 (and, I think, on IDE3), but none of the 3 data drives. Whether that has to do with reinstalling and updating XP Pro on that drive, I don't know. The data drives are formatted with an earlier iteration of XP or Win9x. And all four drives show in BIOS and POST, but not in use.

The one SATA drive I installed shows fine, no problem. It's not my boot drive, but I'm confident it would work if it were.

Having had that success, I bought two brands of IDE-to-SATA adapters. One was Syba brand, the other SIIG. The Syba converter didn't convert anything -- still couldn't see the drive. The SIIG adapter has 44 pins instead of 40 that my HDs have, so it won't even plug in. I wrote their tech support. Took 2 days to answer, and the reply was "try to match up the connectors." I answered back immediately emphasizing the mismatched connector pins. It's now 4 days later, no response. They must hang out with Gigabyte.


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## josh1980 (Mar 8, 2005)

Ok i didnt read all of those posts or all of the original post  but did you go to disk management and and mess around with the stuff in there (right click on my computer go to manage)


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## riley50 (Jan 30, 2005)

yes i am in uk - as you are using a different one i shall be optimistic about my tech support until he speaks!
Apart from the OS which the bios surely cannot 'see' your c: drive is system formatted ie to be able to boot.....
Looks like my first task is to get the bios to see my HDD - i now have a cdrom and hdd on ide1 and another hdd as master on ide2. The latter is invisible!
The gigabyte utilities manager software has just blown out my windows installation. Need to restart!!???!!


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## Reggie (Mar 8, 2005)

*GA-81915P dual Graphic woes*

Hi,

I have just bought a GA-81915P dual Graphic which is slowly driving me loopy too. [ but for a somewhat other reason ]

After much messing around, I noted that the manual tells me to load certain drivers by selecting F6 during install. Use a floppy and the Giga driver cd that came with the board. It is on page 77 titled ' installing Raid drivers'. Apparently the Mobo cannot see the HD's unless these drivers are installed during xp installation. U have to choose the chipset driver yourself. The ICH6R chipset[ southbridge] requires the I.A.A 4.0 driver.
I thought u might like to have a look at it. It may help.

My problem is that if the pc is rebooted after a crash, it loses the HD [ Sata ]
Switching the power off and on fixes it.....until the next crash. Pah!

Reggie



 jptex said:


> New Gigabyte MB GA-8I915P Duo Pro  is driving me batty and I wonder if anyone has experience solving my problem - or telling me there's not a solution.
> 
> The MB has SATA connections, but I'm using 4 ATA drives which worked fine with my old Soyo board. The Gigabyte board has three IDE channels, so I figured it would allow me to use the drives I have and upgrade to SATA later.
> 
> ...


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## goranOh (Mar 8, 2005)

> Looks like my first task is to get the bios to see my HDD - i now have a cdrom and hdd on ide1 and another hdd as master on ide2. The latter is invisible!


Just to let you know: you are not alone!!!
I´m getting crazy here. The difference here may be that I have a MSI 915p NEO2 Platinum motherboard. Still trying to get 2 IDE HDs and DVD to work together.
I also want to switch the HDs whenever I want (I use harddrive-cassettes).

And I can´t connect to the internet from it either, any ideas of that? (I have a cable-modem, connected to the only place it fits on the backpanel).


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## riley50 (Jan 30, 2005)

the good news and the bad - tech support has emailed that there is a reply to my question but i find the page cannot be found!!!!! hopefully they will get it fixed in the next 24hours.
Reggie - kept reading that page but thought it was for raid only. do you have non raid ide drives as well?


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## jptex (Feb 19, 2005)

*hidden ATA drives are everywhere!*

Greetings to this growing gang of frustrants (I'll borrow this French word to describe us!). Personally, I'm learning from every post. Thanks for kicking in.

My latest attempt at the ultimate fix: Yesterday I pulled out the Gigabyte GA-8I915P Duo Pro board that started all this and put in an Asus P5GD1 board. It has about the same capability as the Gigabyte but different RAID systems. And its documentation seems better. I got the new board up and running more quickly than the Gigabyte, without having to reinstall XP. But I still couldn't see my regular ATA drives. So this problem must be related to either the SATA / ATA RAID configurations or to XP's not seeing drives formatted under the same updated version of the OS that's on the boot drive. I have more testing and checking under way right now. But it's encouraging that I can apply some of the lessons learned earlier to help during this round. 

goranOh -- it sounds like you haven't installed the drivers for your LAN (there are two LAN cable connectors, which operate separately I think). I had no internet connection until I installed drivers, on both the Gigabyte and this Asus board.

Reggie -- thanks for the tip. I'll look that up shortly. That's odd about your SATA drive. I put one in and it has not failed to show, this board or the other one. 

One promising thing with the Asus board is that the RAID system seems to have an option that is not a RAID configuration at all. In addition to JBOD (just a bunch of drives [a term I had to look up to believe], also called _spanning_ which apparently does not allow drives to operate independently) the options include one for no raid at all.


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## riley50 (Jan 30, 2005)

got an answer - "disable onboard h/w raid". I am sure i have tried that to no avail. 
maybe we need the raid drivers for non-raid as well ????!!


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## Reggie (Mar 8, 2005)

*Ga-81915P Dual Graphics Extreme Pro*

nley50,

No, I don't have any IDE drives only a Maxtor Sata 120GB. 

I am on my 8th reinstall.....
I always end up with a working system but completely unstable...can't even load office 2003. System crashes whilst extracting setup files. Same as rendering movies. All is well until the end of the rendering phase....then it just locks up. 
[ Nero, dvdsanta ]
Pressing the reset button AFTER a lockup means the MOBO does not see the Sata drive. I have to switch it off and then on.

Various combinations of bios settings tried with CMOS cleared before any new setups/install.
1]OS installed with slipstreamed SP2, motherboard drivers xpress install always locks up. Requires a couple of reboots to complete. Next step,office install [ insert CD only ].....CRASH!
2] OS pre SP1 installed....same thing!

512 x 2 Kingston DDR1 400
Giga GV-NX62TC256D Video
P4 3.2 

Am heading to the dealer in the morning I think.....Hope something is wrong with the MOBO or maybe I need to go back to PC school....

Reggie


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## crazijoe (Oct 19, 2004)

jptex said:


> Once the VIA Raid program was installed and working, I could find all four IDE drives (plus the SATA drive) in Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management. The three missing drives showed in the bottom half of the window (where you normally can manage partitions, etc.). But each showed "unallocated," giving no indication of formatting or data or partitions. And, sure enough, in the top half of that window, only the C: drive and SATA drive showed. I noticed below that each HD was classified as either "Basic" or "Dynamic." (I had to do a search and read up on them.) The new SATA drive was "Dynamic," all the others including the C: drive, "Basic." Wondering if that would make a difference, I converted one of the missing IDE drives to Dynamic, but it made no difference.
> 
> So, though my system shows the missing drives during POST and in Disk Management, those drives do not show in "My Computer" or in "Windows Explorer" or any other file manager.
> 
> ...


From my experience this is true to a certain degree. If you partition the drive and give the partiton a drive letter in Windows XP Disk Management you may not be able to see the partition if you put the drive in another computer. I have ran into this on several occasions. How ever if you partition the drive in disk management, choose not to give it a label or drive letter, then format the partition, it will function in other computers and you can see the files on it. I think it has to do with the fact that you assigned the partition a drive letter and a label on that particular OS. When you remove the drive and put it in another machine, you have a different OS that does not recognize the drive because it did not create the label and the drive letter.




Reggie said:


> nley50,
> I am on my 8th reinstall.....
> I always end up with a working system but completely unstable...can't even load office 2003. System crashes whilst extracting setup files. Same as rendering movies. All is well until the end of the rendering phase....then it just locks up.
> [ Nero, dvdsanta ]
> ...


This sound like bad memory or a pair of memory that isn't identical to each other. Did you buy the memory as a dual channel kit? 
You might try and lax the memory timmings in the BIOS.


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## jptex (Feb 19, 2005)

riley50 said:


> got an answer - "disable onboard h/w raid". I am sure i have tried that to no avail.
> maybe we need the raid drivers for non-raid as well ????!!



Glad you got an answer, riley! Yes, I tried it both enabled and disabled with no discernable difference.

And the Tech Help person in California I talked to said h/w raid has to be enabled. But, then, what do they know?

crazijoe -- Thanks for that insight. It would explain a lot!


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## Reggie (Mar 8, 2005)

crazijoe,

Quote:
This sound like bad memory or a pair of memory that isn't identical to each other. Did you buy the memory as a dual channel kit? 
You might try and lax the memory timmings in the BIOS

RAM is reported as 400 Mhz in BIOS, but I will try it set up manually. Currently it is in Auto.
It is not a matched pair...though. 
I did try set it up as single channel running either one only at a time and it made no difference. 

Keep the suggestions coming! Thanks.

Reggie


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## riley50 (Jan 30, 2005)

A better? reply?

"Please enable the "H/W RAID" in the BIOS. 

Please check 4 HDD jumper (master and slave) are set correctly.

If you are trying to install the OS in the new HDD then you have to install the VIA controller chip drivers. 

If you plan to install Windows XP /2000 directly on RAID systems or on the onboard chips which needs the drivers, you can copy the necessary drivers from our Driver CD to the floppy diskette thru this method : 

1. Please put the Driver CD into a CD ROM /DVD ROM ( of another computer). Remember to put a formatted floppy diskette into the floppy drive. 

2. In "My Computer" icon, click open the drive of the CDROM / DVDROM (where the Driver CD was placed). Look for "BootDrv" folder, and open the folder. 

3. Look for "Menu.exe" and double click it. 

4. A "DOS" Windows will pop out. A list of drivers will appear in the DOS Windows. Please select the number or letter that correspond to the drivers that you need. It would copy the driver files to the floppy diskette automatically. "

have not tried yet - no time this am.


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## Reggie (Mar 8, 2005)

*Ga-81915p Dual Graphic Setup Solved!*

Riley50 and all other fellow sufferers,  

Just got back from PC school :

You r right in the procedure to extract the chipset driver [ IAA ] from the BOOTDRV / menu.exe folder in the motherboard CD. Choose the IAA file item no:1 in the menu of the DOS page that pops up. It will extract and self install onto a formatted floppy.

$$$$$ !!!Gahhhh! 
What I have been failing to realise was that in order for the ICH6R 
[ SATA Raid ] drivers to install, SATA and RAID must be enabled in BIOS first. For the IDE RAID drivers [ VT6410 ] to be installed, H/W Raid must also be enabled in BIOS.
Make sure the boot priority is also set correctly. Also disable bootup floppy seek.

So, first put in the prepared floppy with the chipset drivers, then boot from your XP cd and press F6 when prompted, this will load the chipset drivers [choose the one that says 82801FR/ ICH6R RAID. 

LEAVE the floppy in the drive. When the system reboots to continue loading the driver cab files, it will look to copy the selected files again.

Even if u r not planning on having a RAID array, this driver is essential as it will allow the intel chipset to initialise and to work properly. I have it enabled that it can see my IDE drives.

When the system is up and running, you need to install the motherboard drivers. I found that the express install sucks. I installed everything manually.

Now I have intel application accelerator and also Via Raid on my start menu.

I have just finished rendering a DIVX movie and burning it to a DVD. COOL!

System is stable. Finally.

Comments? :wave: 

Reggie


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## riley50 (Jan 30, 2005)

Hi - at last I think I have a stable non-RAID PATA IDE machine! What a performance - a snippet here and a snippet there.... 
In case someone new arrives here, this worked for me:
I created the floppy, specifying the 'IAA_RAID' drivers;
then started a new install of Windows with CDROM as IDE1 master and my C drive to be as slave. 
I hit F6 right at the beginning of Setup and specified drivers being on floppy etc.. 
By the time the install had dun I had controllers listed in Device Manager but with ??? alongside. 
After loading drivers from the Gigabyte CD the ??? disappeared and I could move my C drive to anywhere on IDE2 or 3. (Need to adjust 'Hard Disk Priority' to keep up with this movement).

At all times any HDD on IDE2 or 3 shud be listed during boot up in the RAID display (I had a dud unit which confused me for a while). I have 'Onboard H/W RAID' enabled and 'On-Chip SATA Mode' set to auto.

I do not know whether you can avoid a new Windows install but I think it is recommended anyway with a new mobo.

Finally - thanks for all the help and support on this forum.


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## tazman3512 (Apr 8, 2005)

*i've got it working*

I've got i915P duo with 2 DVD and 1 IDE. What i've done is put on the IDE1 one DVD and the HDD and install the operating system. On the IDE2 is the other DVD. This DVD is recognized at the BIOS on starting but is not recognized by the Operating System.

Once you've got the operating system running insert the original Motherboard CD and install the driver for RAID support. Once you install that... everything on the other buses (IDE2 and 3) appears.......

Hope this can help...


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## crazijoe (Oct 19, 2004)

tazman3512 said:


> I've got i915P duo with 2 DVD and 1 IDE. What i've done is put on the IDE1 one DVD and the HDD and install the operating system. On the IDE2 is the other DVD. This DVD is recognized at the BIOS on starting but is not recognized by the Operating System.
> 
> Once you've got the operating system running insert the original Motherboard CD and install the driver for RAID support. Once you install that... everything on the other buses (IDE2 and 3) appears.......
> 
> Hope this can help...


This is because IDE2 and 3 are on a separate controller and not on the ICH6 controller. You would have to install the drivers of the GigaRAID controller at the F6 prompt during the install for the drives to work duing the installation of XP.


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## jcm (Apr 25, 2005)

*mb can't recognise hd*

Hi guys read your promblems with this mb and having similar proms. I have the ga 8i915p Duo mother board -- I am using a 200 gig sata hd and installed xp pro - was working like a gem then all of the sudden my client rang up and said system disk failure --- I couldn't get it to boot and it wouldn't even show up in the cmos , so I sent away the hd and got a new one, now I can boot off the cd rom to formatt the hard drive and this is doing so, but coming up with the same error --- this is recognised in the cmos , but not booting like its spoused to my settings are sure to be correct -- cpuid limit set to 3 is diabled -- cause this is xp i am trying to install and my on chip sata mode is at enhanced ------ i'm at a brick wall with this one ca any one help?

another thing is anyone able to tell me step by step how to build service pack two in to my version of xp pro and burn out a bootable copy?


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