Cant format Maxtor SATA drives

[sivler surfer]

Just bought 2 new maxtor SATA drives for a new system and I cant format them!!
I have made the bootable floppy using the maxblast software from the maxtor site. But it fails to detect the drives.
The Maxtor site says that you must have the SATA driver on a floppy before running Maxblast.
This is confusing as I dont have enough room to put the promise sata driver on the floppy. And then would I need to edit the config.sys to load the driver?!
My motherboard is Asus P4C800 deluxe.

Any ideas? This is driving me mad!!!

jason.conway@ntlworld.com[/list]

 

[blakerwry]

what OS are you installing ? winNT/2k/XP? or win9x?

If NT based, put the S-ATA driver on floppy, boot using the OS CD, press F6 to load the driver and then format using the OS setup.

If your drives are larger than 120GB you may need to slipstream XP SP1 or 2K sp4 into your OS install in order to format the whole disk as 1 partition, otherwise the setup can only partition upto ~120GB and the rest will have to be partitioned after you install SP1 or SP4 respectively.


so, simply put, avaiod maxtor's software.

 

[Jan Kivar]

The SATA ports in i8x5 motherboards (the ones in ICH5) are unvisible to legacy OSs (DOS -> WinME), if You don't activate the ports in legacy mode in BIOS. 2k/XP works OK.

If You are using on-board RAID (I think P4C800 has one) they should work fine in legacy OSs, if You just setup the array in the RAID card's BIOS first.

Anyway, forget the MaxBlast. You don't need it.

Cheers,

Jan

 

[sivler surfer]

I am doing a fresh install of win xp and I want to run the drives in Raid0.
Loaded the promise xp driver at the F6 prompt ok. But when I get to the press enter to set windows up it says it cant detect any drives?!
The drives are conected to the promise SATA ports .
I've set them as the stripe array doing the ctrl-f so the motherboard can see them.
What am I doing wrong?

 

[sivler surfer]

Forgot to mention that the drives are both 120gb and I have winxp sp1

 

[sivler surfer]

doh! just worked out I was using the wrong driver!
I blame my massive hangover...
mmm beer!