ASUS A7N8X-E SSCI - SATA - PREP HDD?

[Brangwen]

Fellow Members:

I have a 160GB SATA hard drive cabled to this very smooth running motherboard. The only time I've ever utilized a SCSI device was with a Promise Card (PCI slot). I can only recall cabling a CD burner to that card.

This is the first time I am attempting to utilize a SCSI hard drive. I am using this as a single drive only (not RAID array!) The only thing that has been done with this hard drive is a low-level format. It has not been partitioned or in any other manner prepared for use.

Given that I am new to this, would someone kindly share the procedure for preparing such a drive for use? E.g. FDISK . . .

Thanks!

Brangwen

BTW: drivers are loaded and this hard drive shows up under the "Asus Probe."

Note: Win2KPro

[Brangwen]

Fellow Members:

I'll follow up my Thread Starting Post instead of a ^bump^ .

Essentially, I think a boot disk could do the trick.

I know I could boot off the Windoze CD (as that's how I loaded it originally, but onto a IDE HDD) and configure and load Win2KPro onto the SATA/SCSI HDD ... but I don't want an OS on the SATA/SCSI HDD!

The drivers are loaded for the controller, the devices (controller & HDD "are working properly ..."

So, I shall create & try a bootdisk with fdisk and so on and see what happens.

I'm still open to suggestions ... Where are the SATA/SCSI experts today?

Thx.

Brangwen

[Brangwen]

Fellow Members:

Well, I think I figured out how to do this.

I went into the Windows 2000 Professional "Disk Management" as one would to prepare any drive for utilization.

Interestingly (keeping in mind that I am wholly unfamiliar with SCSI hard drives!) My 160GB Maxtor (SCSI) hard drive is listed as a "Dynamic Drive" ... So instead of partitions, I created "Volumes" !

However, I ran into a problem of sorts ... or at least a "peculiarity." I could only create "volumes" (or "partitions") of apprx'ly 16GB in size each, so I ended up with TEN 16 GB VOLUMES! or PARTITIONS! How come? When I tried creating a volume of greater than 16-18 GBs, a message told me it was too large. When I made the volume smaller I was informed that size was too small! Why is this?!?

I was also given choices as to File Allocation Tables (FAT 32; FAT 16; NTFS). I chose FAT32. (As an aside: could I mix FAT sizes? If yes, would FAT16 ... 512 or 1024 been more likely to have worked as larger volumes?)

I can use this HDD, but it seems silly that I end up with so many (relatively) small volumes (partitions)!

CAN ANYONE SHARE SOME LIGHT ON THIS?

Thanks!

Brangwen

[sm8000]

Windows 2000 and XP will only create partitions up to 32GB. I don't know why your's are smaller, but if you want bigger, go with NTFS.

Also, you don't want it as a dynamic drive. Remove that - reinitialize/reformat it if need be. Right-click on it in Disk Manager. Dynamic drives are for use with Windows' software RAID.

Bear in mind this is NOT a SCSI hard drive, it's SATA which is a fancy form of IDE. It only shows up as SCSI in Device Manager because of third party mass storage drivers - this is perfectly normal and natural in any NT-based Windows.