Adam Albright

On Sun, 15 Apr 2007 09:46:01 -0700, Scuba
<Scuba@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>I have just loaded vista on an AMD Anthlon 64 FX-55 with 2 QB of ram and an
>A8V Deluxe motherboard.
>
>Vista recognizes my boot drive and my two of my drives that are raid'd.
>There is one drive that I used for back-up and was reconized with no issues
>under XP.
>
>I went and downloaded the most current drivers from Promise...it is a
>promise fasttrac 378.
>
>I loaded from a floppy during installation.
>
>During boot-up I can see where all drives are recognized but when I get to
>Vista, The one drive can not be seen from the "My computer" window.
>
>Under the hardware devices , storage controllers, I have:
>
>Microsoft iSCSI Initiator
>VIA VT8237 RAID Controller
>Windows Promise RAID Console SCSI Processor Device
>WinXP Promise FastTrac 378 Controller
>
>At a loss on this one.

I had a similar problem. Inspite having installed the latest
controller driver for the drive I had to wait until Gigabtye (the
maker of my MB) released a BIOS update before Vista would finally
"see" the drive as a SATA device. Before doing that it would only see
it as a IDE device and run it that way. Even though it now does work
as a SATA drive, Vista is way slower with file copying/moving which
has been discussed repeatedly in several other threads the usual Vista
fan boys get upset over.

Generally three things to look for:

1. If needed, a SATA driver that runs under Vista for your disk
controller regardless if it is onboard your MB or some external
card.

2. A update for your MB's entire chipset, that correctly adds/updates
necessary IDE/SATA drivers. This is DIFFERENT then #1. One driver
may only update the IDE/SATA controller while another may be
needed to properly patch the South Bridge that controls these
functions. For example I had originally downloaded some drivers
directly from the Intel site since I have a Intel ICH8R that
provides that function. Didn't help, until Gigabyte released a
chipset update over a month later.

3. A update to your BIOS often is also necessary. If you do searching
on the web, countless forums have hundreds of posts talking about
the failures of SATA drives under Vista unless you do these things.

Finally, don't forget you may very well have to fiddle with BIOS
settings AFTER you install the latest drivers, chipset updates and
BIOS upgrade. I did.