PCA Forums

I have one WD Raptor SATA drive in my comp with no other hard drives. Recently I got a RocketMate SATA drive enclosure (IDE to SATA) with a Rocket 1511 PCI controller card (HighPoint). After installing the PCI card, the card bios comes up on boot-up but does not detect the hard drive installed in the drive enclosure. I installed the hardware in a second different comp and it detects the drive without any problems. The controller card is not OS dependent during boot-up. <--- I say that because the first comp is WinXP and the second is Win98SE. Once booted into WinXP or Win98SE, the drivers are installed without any probs. I've tried putting the jumper on Master, Slave and CS, still no detection on the first comp. I tried tech support with Highpoint but somehow they can't read the whole situation. They plainly missed the part about how it works in the second comp and told me the hard drive was defective. Still waiting for a response from Epox.

Anyone have any ideas on this problem ?

Can you give me more of an idea of what your two setups are hardware wise? I'm assuming you have regular IDE drives in there, and want to add in the SATA drive? Something like that?

My main comp has one hard drive in it, a WD Raptor (SATA). I picked up a HighPoint SATA enclosure and put a WD 20gig IDE drive inside. The 20gig does not get detected on bootup. The HighPoint PCI controller card bios cannot detect the drive. I put the HighPoint parts in a Slot A machine that has one IDE drive already and the HighPoint bios detects the 20gig in the SATA enclosure.

Main Comp:
Epox 8RDA3+
XP3000+
2x512PC3200
WD Raptor 36.7GB SATA
LiteOn 52x32x52x
Pioneer 16x DVD
SB Audigy2
ATI Rad AIW 9700 Pro
6in1 USB card reader
450w KingWin PS

Slot A Comp:
Biostar M7MKE
Slot A Classic 650MHz
196megsPC100
S3-Virge graphics (PCI)
No sound
300w generic PS
1.44 floppy
2.1gig HD
44xMax CD-ROM

Hrmmm, I'd poke around the BIOS a bit - the Epox might be set to not initialize any card based BIOS'es or acknowledge them. I know in a lot of servers I've used, the BIOS has to be told to listen for other cards and such.
Maybe it's because you have 2 SATA chips, one onboard and one on card... Might be confusing the board.. I'm pretty darn sure it's either a bios thing, or epox just doesn't listen to additional SATA chips - not sure if it helps much, but it really sounds like a conflict because your trying to use two diffrent SATA chips...

I'm thinking it's the two SATA controller conflict.

That's what I'm thinking too - maybe they are trying to share an IRQ. You *should* be able to run as many SATA controllers as you want, but it seems like it's misbehaving somehow hehe.