Hitachi T7K500 found in Windows but not by feature tool?

-BA- · 30 May 2007 at 23:43

OK guys this is kind of a weird one. All the posts I have seen from people concerning their problems getting their SATA-II drives to work due to them being set to 3.0Gb/s rather than 1.5.

I have just installed my 500Gig T7K500 under Vista and had to install and IDE SATA driver for my Promise Raid controller. All went well and the controller was found, I plugged in the drive and put the boot cd for Feature Tool into the drive. As the bios did its business I noticed that the Promise Raid recognised the drive straight away. NB: I also have 2 x WDC 36.7 Gig Raptors in RAID on the VIA raid as my system drives. Feature Tool loaded up and did its bus scan and found absolutely everything (including the VIA RAIDed Raptors) but did not display the Hitachi drive whatsoever.

This is the weird part. Everyone else is complaing that Windows does not see the drive at all but I have been able to go into disk management and partition/format it into 2 primaries without any problems. The drives show up in My Computer and I am currently copying a folder across but is showing under Vista's calculations as copying at 850k/s.

The upshot is that it seems to be working of a fashion but is very slow and for some reason does not show up in Feature Tool. Do I presume that if this disk was indeed set at 3.0Gb/sec then it would not work at all?

Mainboard is Asus A8V Deluxe as per my sig.

TIA

BA

-BA- · 31 May 2007 at 21:31

Anyone got any ideas? This has me kinda stumped.

Thanks

lsg1r · 31 May 2007 at 23:20

temporarily unplug the raptors and use the other controller to set up the hitachi and then put it back on the other controller.

Alternatively adjust the settings on the promise to be a standard controller for individual disks and try that (working on memory of an older promise controller here so I assume its the same). Then set back when finished.

Its not like the hitachi tool actually enters windows

-BA- · 31 May 2007 at 23:40

When I installed the drive I set the controller up in IDE mode in the BIOS rather than RAID so I think that is what you meant for individual disks. I wonder whether Feature Tool has issues reading from two controllers.

I will try what you suggested this weekend. One thing though. Substituting my two raptors for the Hitachi on the VIA controller won't effect the array in any way will it? Are there any settings held on the RAID chip itself? Don't want to switch it to IDE mode and then find I have wiped its settings.

Thanks for reply though, all feedback is very welcome.

BA

lsg1r · 1 Jun 2007 at 00:26

It shouldn't affect the disksa as long as everything is plugged in the same socket etc. Might be worth noting down any specific settings in the raid config though just in case you need to set anything after resetting back to a raid array.