Member Avatar for dewabo

Has anyone done this and if so what kind of problems am I getting myself into? My adaptor board is due in on Monday, it is a Rosewill RC212 4xSATA +1XIDE R .Any advice on setting it up!

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A few practical notes that build on what and have been discussing.

Many add‑in SATA cards behave like a separate controller: they either present an option ROM at POST (so the motherboard can list them as a bootable device) or they are only exposed to the operating system via drivers. If drives added by the card do not appear in the motherboard BIOS, that can be normal — the OS can still use the disk once the card’s driver is loaded, but you cannot boot from it unless the card provides and enables a boot ROM.

Quick checklist to troubleshoot or improve the setup:

  • Watch POST for the card’s text (chipset/vendor name) and press any key it suggests to enter the card BIOS. If nothing appears the card may lack option ROM support.
  • Install the vendor/chipset drivers in the OS (for older Windows installs you may need the F6 method).
  • Use Disk Management (Windows) or a Linux live CD to confirm the disk is seen and to initialize/partition it.
  • Verify power: use proper SATA power connectors and ensure the PSU can handle spin‑up current; cheap Molex->SATA adapters can cause problems when multiple drives start together.
  • If link training fails, check whether the drive or controller has a jumper to force 1.5 Gbit/s mode for compatibility.
  • Identify the card chipset (use the PCI vendor/device ID shown in Device Manager or lspci) and get drivers from the chipset vendor; the helps with that.

For background on the interfaces and addressing issues mentioned earlier, see Serial ATA and Logical Block Addressing: Serial ATA and Logical block addressing.

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Member Avatar for dcc

That card has some good reviews, looks like it will do what is advertised. It list a transfer rate of 150kbps for SATA, but the is no SATA2.

If the reviews can be trusted it looks like an elegant solution to the addition of a SATA drive.

Member Avatar for dewabo

The reviews are what I went on when ordering this card, IDE won't see the full size of the HDD and you can't get 500mb hdd in IDE formatt. So this is going to be interesting to see if it works as promised. will keep you posted as to how it turns out.

Member Avatar for dcc

IDE doesn't limit the recognition of the size of the hdd the BIOS does. The SP2 for XP and SP4 for W2k will allow you to recognize the larger size hdds.

To understand this better read about the 48 bit LBA.

Member Avatar for dewabo

Well everything in good,and the HDD works as promised, the system sees the HDD on startup equipment scan, but the BIOS has yet to see it. Other then some software problems it seems to be working. :)

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