I’m really not comfortable with SATA. I got the HTPC going with its sole SATA drive after only a couple of BIOS changes but I really didn’t understand what was going on.
This machine is incomprehensible. There is a single IDE header, four yellow SATA sockets and two purple ones. The yellow sockets are for the ICH9 Southbridge controller and the purple ones are the Gigabyte ones that are able to operate as a RAID pair. All of the instructions are for setting up a RAID set – which is really hard when you only have one drive. But I used the purple socket anyway because mirroring is something I’d like to do soon.
When you get to the BIOS, it’s no help at all. It shows 6 pairs of Master/Slave drives – really stupid when SATA only supports a single drive. Go back and count the connectors – I see one Master/Slave pair and six single drives. You also have to battle with the concept of AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface). All sorts of caveats on its use but it sounds like the way forward, so I selected it.
It just didn’t work. I loaded the Vista installer 3 times before I took the hint that it really couldn’t find a hard disk. Vista prompts for you to load a driver (there is one on the Gigabyte DVD) but then it can’t use it. So, I set to work permuting the settings for the disk drives in the BIOS before giving up and deciding to pull the hard disk out and look at at it.
I put the machine back up on the assembly bench and pulled the drive out (on the really nice slide-out guides). The power connector fell off, it had never been plugged in properly. I’ve read that SATA power connectors can break off so I hadn’t applied enough force. This time I got it right and you probably could easily break the board with the force needed to get the connector on.
I put the drive back in and it worked straightaway. I felt appropriately stupid.