Having a problem with my Asus A8V mobo and WD raptors....

[Soapmonkey]

I was finally building my system today, I got it all together, everything looks good, I'm marveling at the basic improvements over my XP 1800, when I run into this problem which became unsolvable. I'm looking for help.

For what ever reason the Asus A8V mobo is not seeing my WD Raptor HDs, I'm not setting up a raid, I have two 10k raptors I want to use as separate drives, I tried a couple different ways of hooking them up, swapt one out for another, tried changine the jumper settings, changing settings in the bios, I mean everything. I managed to get a WD floppy to format the drive so that is appears in some parts of the Windows setup initially, but eventually I get to the same screen where I'm told "no drive is connected" or something that extent. I just can't figure out why the connected drives are not beeing seen by the rest of the system.

I searched around the net, and I found a guy who had a similar problem, but he never said how he fixed it, in fact he didn't even know how he fixed it, he siad he just installed a bunch of drivers and some how it worked. Thats the best answer I could find.

I have sent emails to WD and Asus with questions, and I intended to call on Mon when the WD raptor support line reopens, but monday is a long way from now, and I'm totally out of ideas, I know I'm not the only person with this problem, so I'm asking you guys if any of you has heard of a solution?

Thanks

 

[{Sniping}Waste]

You might have to strip the drives first. Are you using the onboard SATA from the VIA south brige or the Promise 20378 controller?

EDIT
Did you install the Raid drivers?

 

[Soapmonkey]

I am using SATA via the south, not the promise, I have not installed any drivers yet, just attempted to boot up the OS. Asus had a disc in the box, but I can't boot from it, and I tried changing some of the mobo defalut settings from Raid to IDE, but the drive is still unrecognized.

 

[{Sniping}Waste]

You have to have the drivers in for windows to see the hard drives. You can go to Asus website and download the updated drivers.

 

[Soapmonkey]

It seems I had the right idea today but it wasn't until Asus support finally called me back that I think I have the answer. Here it is in case somebody else has the problem.

Plug the hard drives you intend to use as individual drives into the promise Sata connections. In the Bios, under advance, enable IDE mode instead of the default Raid setting. Then, useing another PC, copy the 378ATA drivers to a floppy from the support CD. During the OS set up, use the floppy for the drivers for teh hard drives.

It seems so simple, but I was running circles, I was just one step away from this solution too, I had the floppy, the Bios setting, and the Promise connection, but for whatever reason I just didn't try them all together. I hope this helps somebody else.