D975XBX2 - SATA Revisited

[tatanka]

Hi - new here and there seems to be some BX2 experience on this board. Man, I need some.

I've got a BX2 system I built about 4 months ago. I originally set it up with 2 SATA DVD burners and 2 640 Gig SATA hard drives (all on the black connectors). Works fine, and I'm running Windows XP Home, SP3.

Now I want to add 2 1TB SATA hard drives -- have one, the other is on order. This would give me a total of 6 SATA devices. I can't get ANYTHING to work on the red/blue connectors. I plug the 1TB drive in and the Marvell part of the BIOS sees it, but Windows doesn't see it at all. This is whether I have it configured for RAID 0 or no RAID. Played with the Marvell RAID stuff a bit (don't really want RAID -- would rather just have 8 plain SATA ports). I can configure a 1-disk RAID 0 device in the BIOS, but the Marvell MRU program just says "No adapter found." It's like once the system is booted, nothing can see the "red/blue" half of the SATA stuff. The MRU program installs without error and I've even manually installed the driver using the "Have Disk" method. Appears to work, but no joy. The Marvell manual says I should see this listed in Device Manager under SCSI and RAID devices. It's not there.

So, what the heck? I just want a couple more SATA ports to connect my drives to. Is this not possible? The manual for the MB kinda indicates that if you're not interested in RAID, you can plug drives in anywhere (with the known exception of optical).

Thanks for any ideas.

[vbironchef]

Your D975XBX2 only has 4 SATA ports. Look in your manual it will tell you the other ports are for something else. Edit: 2 are for discrete raid (whatever that is) and 2 are for external raid.

[tatanka]

The manual states on Page 18:

Serial ATA
The desktop board supports eight Serial ATA channels, connecting one device per
channel in either a RAID or a non-RAID configuration.

Non-RAID would seem to indicate that the other 4 channels can be run without RAID.

[hkancyr]

I run the "other" ones with a RAID 0 and a couple single drives. There is something in the archives about problems booting from the Marvell ports, I just ran across that problem with trying to boot Win 7 from the Marvell, so I didn't I booted from the Intel ones.
But I do remember issues with people using SATA optical drives, so look around you will find it here somewhere.

[tatanka]

Thanks- Yeah, I read about the optical and boot problems (and actually, if optical worked on the Marvell ports, I could as easily load all the hard drives on the black connectors). Not to be, though.

It's mostly acting like Windows doesn't see the secondary controller at all. I'll try the F6 thing, booting from CD when I get home later today.

[vbironchef]

Have you looked on page 14? I am looking at it from the intel website. Look on page 15 as well. It could help. I have the same board so maybe I just don't understand what you are trying to do. http://download.intel.com/support/mothe ... 4501us.pdf I have two sata drives and two dvd burners, the other 4 sata connectors I can't get to work with things in my rig. Are you sure they are not for external ports. GG and FF Look they are for external sata.

[tatanka]

Thanks for the comment, vb. I was looking at the Product guide -- hadn't seen the technical spec book before. Interesting! From what I can tell, the "other" 4 ports (red and blue) are controlled using a Marvell SATA controller. The red port is for external SATA, but I'm not sure why it's any different (other than being red). The black connectors use an Intel ICH7 controller.

On page 27 of the technical spec, it says:

NOTE
The Marvell 88SE6145 controller supports single drive non-RAID configurations as well
as RAID configurations.

I tried getting the latest Marvell drivers to load while booting off the XP Home CD last night. No joy -- it just comes up with an error that says none of the drivers apply to any of the hardware. Then I noticed that the Marvell manual has a list of operating systems it works with and XP Pro is listed, but XP Home isn't listed. Maybe this is a clue (or at least tonight's project). At this point, I really think the trick is just getting the drivers loaded and working.

One thing for sure -- Intel didn't make this easy.

[tatanka]

Got it working (YeeHAW!!)

Just a matter of getting the Marvell drivers loaded and working. I'd loaded these manually with no luck. If they're loaded and working, you WILL see the Marvell controller in Device Manager under SCSI and RAID controllers. I never saw that, but missed the yellow (?) under "Other devices." Turns out, that was the Marvell controller -- verified this by looking up the vendor ID on the non-working device.

Clicked on it, told it to reload the driver and pointed it at the i386 set in the downloaded Marvell drivers from Intel. It loaded right up.

Once loaded, my 1TB SATA drive (plugged into port 4 - BLUE) shows up in Disk management. At this point, it's just like any other hard drive. Partition, initialize, ready to rock.

So, got DVD burners on ports 0 and 1, 640GB hard drives on 2 and 3, 1TB hard drive on 4 and my second 1TB hard drive will arrive here tomorrow for port 5. 6 drives, no RAID and no add-on controllers. This is my "main" computer, but I use it as a media server for my home theater. With this setup (WD "Green" drives), I won't have external drives spun up all the time for the hour or two a day they get used.

Thanks for letting me test your patience, all.