I've just upgraded my system with some new bits.
Gigabyte 965P motherboard
2.4 Ghz Intel Core2 Duo
Albatron Geforce 8800GTS
2Gig of DDR2 ram from Patriot

As it turns out the motherboard only has 1 IDE connection, so I had to also swap out my DVD drive with a new SATA one just to get up and running. However, I cant seem to get my SATA hard drive to be visable in Vista. I've installed the drivers ect, can see it in the bios, but not in Vista. The hard drive manager says it is offline but it wont bring it online.

Humf. Any ideas???

Have you got it connected to the silicon image io chip on your board or the intel ports?

You can tell by checking the colour of the port on the board vs the port colour in the manual. If you're using the sil chip then swap it to an intel port. There are a few known issues with that silicon image chip.

Nearly got the same rig as me! Just check which sata port you got it plugged into, if it is the raid port it also doubles as an ide port which you can change in bios. I trust you are going in through disk management and clicking on the "make volume".

I got 3 Sata HDDs and 2 Sata DVDs and they all work no problems. I've added and removed HDDs no problems in Vista Ultimate.

Will I loose the data if I go make volume? I'm a bit worried as I have years of family photos and videos on that drive.

Thanks for the tips guys

You shouldn't but I would *strongly* recommend you plug that drive into another machine and back up your irreplaceable stuff first.

I concur.....backup first (but surely you did this before upgrading your machine).

Why did you have to buy a SATA ROM to get it working?

Any ROM drive should work quite happily on the IDE port on the board.

You haven't listed the specific board you are using, but if the IDE port runs through an ITE/RAID controller you'd need to load the drivers for that during the windows "press f6" blue screen at the start of installation from a CD or otherwise install it from within windows otherwise you won't see anything plugged into it.

Rubba,
The new motherboard only has 1 IDE controller. I had to use it for my other 2 IDE hard drives

I'll have another go at this when I get home. Cheers for the input guys.

Oh you have IDE HDD's fair enough then.

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