Did you try setting both ide drives to cable select?

Otherwise i would start with 1 drive first, if it works add the 2nd.

meljor wrote:

Did you try setting both ide drives to cable select?

Otherwise i would start with 1 drive first, if it works add the 2nd.

Not yet, I will try that next when I get home today. I just find it odd that none of the drives are recognized in the bios, including the SATA drives. The DVD drive is on it's own IDE channel and is the only thing that gets picked up.

Can you set the sata ports to ide mode? That usually fixes things as well.

Maybe just disconnect all drives and start with one ide master. If that doesn't work the board might have a problem.
Sata drives on a raid controller are sometimes not seen in bios. just boot from scsi and it should pick up the raid array (needs drivers when installing windows).

Ok, did a quick test. I have the p4c800 so it's almost the exact same board.

I also have 74gb velociraptors so that came in handy. Hooked up a velociraptor to the sata1 port and a samsung 80gb ide to the ide master port, it found them both at the first boot and were both visible in bios.

So, reset the bios and start with one drive, otherwise i'm afraid your board has a problem.

Thanks for the suggestions! I wont be home for another 4 hours but I will be trying these out after I change the oil in my car. I may also just try connecting everything to the Intel sata/IDE ports and leaving the Promise ports empty. I think the motherboard is alright, since it was booting off the 74gb Velociraptor alone just fine before I started adding hard drives. Thanks for taking the time and testing btw!

No problem, hope it works!

meljor wrote:

No problem, hope it works!

Hey sorry for the late reply! I just got around to playing with this system more this week. Using some of your tips I got everything setup and working! Bad news? I got an am2 6000+ system that all these hard drives are going into instead now for a far superior server. Sooo I ended up stripping like 3 systems to reconfigure them all and am half way done now 😊

ODwilly wrote:

I am in the midst of turning this system into a media center/server and need a bit of help.
ISSUE: Hard drives not detected. I have two 250gb SATA drives connected to the Promise controlled SATA ports and a 74gb Velociraptor as the boot drive on SATA port 1. Also a 200 and 400 connected to the Promise IDE channel as master/slave. In the bios NONE of the hard drives show up. Yet I can go into the Promise RAID utility and make an array out of the two sata 250's and the ide 200. Then the bios recognizes the RAID array but none of the other drives! Should I just play around with connecting the drives to different ports until I get a working combination or could it be a simple bios setting set wrong? Thanks for any advice or help.

Pardon for me breaking in... Why go for SATA on this board. Back, when I made a living by building computers. SATA was a pain and a bitch in most cases.
Call it hardware-childhood-sickness if you like. Sata was unstable, crashed and accidentially deleted files. And to be shure that you don't have one of those boards, then avoid onboard SATA all together. Mmmm.... Get a SATA controller for the PCI bus. Just avoid that onboard SATA.

The problems were amoung Socket 478 boards and some low priced Amd-64/Athlon-64 compatible systems. And it was all SATA-1 not 2 related.
As I remember. You'r board have SATA-1. If not. Then I eat my words. 😁 😁 😉

Naaa.... If any onboard SATA problems arises. I just avoid that onboard. As this is a media server and not a workstation.
You know. Not loosing any files at any point, before you delete it personally.

I've had a P4C800-E since 2003 and used it in my main PC until 2007. I've used the SATA ports in Raid, IDE and AHCI and don't recall any particular problems, apart from the fact that you needed to load the Raid driver on a diskette for the windows XP installation.

I originally used 2 maxtor 160gb drives in Raid 0 and now I still use the board in a spare system with a WD 36gb Raptor... works fine!

Brostenen: You are right that early Sata was unstable and a pain back then, but it was mostly with Socket A VIA chipset implementations IIRC. This 478 board at least uses a nice Promise chip for an extra IDE channel and for 2? of the 4 sata ports. IIRC the first 2 SATA ports are actually Intel and are amazingly trouble-free. The reason behind SATA vs IDE is that all of my IDE hard drives are either a small capacity, have 40k hours on them, or both.

MMaximus: I agree it is a wonderful motherboard and 100% stable 100% of the time. I found part of my problem, both my IDE drives were set to Slave for some bizarre reason.

ODwilly wrote:

IIRC the first 2 SATA ports are actually Intel and are amazingly trouble-free.

Yep. XP even installs on them in native mode without requiring any drivers. I've been running 2 SATA drives on the 2 Intel ICH5R ports with this board (and before that, the P4P800-E) for years, without any issues. The Promise chip also worked well on the rare occasions when I needed to attach a third drive, but I haven't been running with such configurations for extended periods, nor did I ever configure any RAID arrays.

ODwilly wrote:

Brostenen: You are right that early Sata was unstable and a pain back then, but it was mostly with Socket A VIA chipset implementations IIRC. This 478 board at least uses a nice Promise chip for an extra IDE channel and for 2? of the 4 sata ports. IIRC the first 2 SATA ports are actually Intel and are amazingly trouble-free. The reason behind SATA vs IDE is that all of my IDE hard drives are either a small capacity, have 40k hours on them, or both.

MMaximus: I agree it is a wonderful motherboard and 100% stable 100% of the time. I found part of my problem, both my IDE drives were set to Slave for some bizarre reason.

Yeah... Now it all comes back to me. That VIA chipset is shit, and I have seen a lot of HDD's die because of that.
Think I managed to build faulty machines for aproximately 3 weeks, before the first machines came back to be fixed.
That is the reason why I switched to SATA in 2010 and not 2005.