Adding third SATA drive to Asus m/board with only 2 ports

Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson

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I have a large SATA drive I want to add to an oldish Asus m/board that currently has 2 W/Digital drives in a RAID format on the only 2 SATA ports on the board. I want to forgo RAID and have the 3 drives in a conventional format. Can I buy a card that will allow this? I got a card that in hindsight appears to only want to work with another 2 drives in a RAID on it....As it stands I can't see, nor can my bios, the third SATA drive. A friend thinks I need a card with onboard bios to see more SATA drives? OS is Windows 2000, I want Obuntu on, or the option of more drivesapce unders Windows, from the 3rd drive.

Thanks :)
 
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I bought this http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CC-025-AD to add a few extra older Maxtor 200gig Harddrives to my setup, I put in the the slot was recognised in BIOs no problems. At this point though I might recommend if it aint seen in BIOS in your setup, a possible BIOS update might help?

Anyway that card I posted will suit your needs and it will not look for RAID options unless you ask it to.

Regards

Vic
 
Chris Wilson said:
I have a large SATA drive I want to add to an oldish Asus m/board that currently has 2 W/Digital drives in a RAID format on the only 2 SATA ports on the board. I want to forgo RAID and have the 3 drives in a conventional format. Can I buy a card that will allow this? I got a card that in hindsight appears to only want to work with another 2 drives in a RAID on it....As it stands I can't see, nor can my bios, the third SATA drive. A friend thinks I need a card with onboard bios to see more SATA drives? OS is Windows 2000, I want Obuntu on, or the option of more drivesapce unders Windows, from the 3rd drive.

Thanks :)
Click to expand...

You should be able to run three single drives without too much hassle, in a worst case you may have to create 3 separate RAID0 arrays of one disk each but let's worry about that later.

Drives attached to an external RAID card usually don't appear in the main system BIOS, rather the card itself deals with them. If you can give me the answers to a few questions then I should be able to get you up and going with the setup you have at the moment. Each one is pretty much dependent on a yes from the previous one so don't worry if you end up with a bunch of "no"s.

What make and model are the RAID card and HDD?

When you boot the PC with the new RAID card and disk installed is there an extra BIOS splash screen after the main one which gives you a key combo to access the RAID configuration tool?

Have you been into the RAID config tool and setup the new disk?

Is the RAID card appearing in Device Manager in W2K?

Have you loaded the drivers for the card?

Have you created and formatted a partition on the new disk in Disk Management?
 
This is the card I have:

http://www.newlinkproducts.co.uk/prodinfo.asp?catID=6&prodID=185

Before I waste your time can you tell me if it is indeed possible to use this card to add a *SINGLE* additional SATA drive to the existing 2 in RAID1 on the motherboard SATA sockets? I am beginning to wonder if the card is only designed to work with *2* drives in a RAID and not to add just one single SATA drive to an existing RAID 1 SATA pairing? Thanks.
 
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I just refiited the card, but I didn't load the CD software this time, that came with it. The PC now "sees" the new big SATA drive and its BIOS is now coming up :) However, the bios for the card shows first, the RAID drives BIOS shows second. My problem now is that I can't boot into windows, it boots Obuntu Linuxs' GRUB everytime, which is installed on an IDE drive off one of the ribbon cables. There are also an IDE CD player and an IDE DVD recorder on the IDE motherboard connectors. No matter which boot drive I select in the PC's BIOS screen I can't get it to boot 2000. It just boots the IDE drive with Linux on it. I suspect I need it to boot the RAID drives BIOS first? Is there a way round this? Thanks for any help, I am a lot out of depthe here!
 
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Hmm, this might be a problem - the BIOS only has HDD or SCSI as the sensible boot options, now if I remember correctly you'll have been using the SCSI option for the onboard SATA controller. The PCI card is also being recognised as a "SCSI" device but with a higher priority than the RAID controller. There are a couple of options going forward:

  • Look in the PCI card BIOS to see if there's an option to disable the boot ROM.
  • Move the PCI card to a slot at the opposite end of the board from the CPU, the priority of the slot decreases as you move away from the CPU so you might be able to force it below the RAID controller.
 
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