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Prion
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SATA controller snag installing Win 7 x64 Home Premium

Mon Oct 25, 2010 9:49 pm

My desktop blew its system drive in a power outage a couple of weeks ago and after 6 years of running WinXP (first SP2, later SP3) I figured I'd give Win 7 and 64-bit computing a shot. Picked up a new WD Caviar Black 640GB and pulled down an ISO from MSDN. The drive is connected to a Silicon Image 3114 PCI SATA card, for which I dutifully got the most up-to-date Win7 x64 drivers from siliconimage.com and threw them on a thumb drive. So far so good.

Hooked everything up, fired up the system, popped the Win7 install DVD-R into the drive and the installer took off. Chose custom install (not like there's anything around to upgrade from anymore) and it gives a totally blank listing of drives/storage controllers. Choose to load a driver, but nothing's in the list. Uncheck the Only Show Drivers for Found Hardware (or whatever it said) and get a listing of the SI3114 drivers on the USB stick. Choose it and hit next. System churns for a bit and the progress bar goes through the motions, then back to the same screen I started at with no drives/storage controllers listed.

Please help? System specs:

Athlon 64 2.4GHz, Abit KV8 Pro m/b (onboard SATA disabled), 2GB DDR400, Radeon X800XL AGP, and add-in boards for IEEE1394 and 802.11g WLAN

The floppy drive is FUBAR and the DVD+RW drives will only read DVDs (no CDs) so I'd have a hard time of getting XP installed at this point.
 
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Re: SATA controller snag installing Win 7 x64 Home Premium

Tue Oct 26, 2010 6:36 am

Sounds like the drivers don't match the controller, or the installer doesn't see the controller at all. Are you absolutely certain you got the correct drivers?

You could try using the onboard SATA ports...
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Prion
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Re: SATA controller snag installing Win 7 x64 Home Premium

Tue Oct 26, 2010 11:46 am

Thanks for the reply! The controller card chipset has 3114 silkscreened onto it and onto the PCB, and I got the x64 base and RAID drivers for the 3114 from the silicon image website. I got the 32-bit Win7 drivers also just for testing but (of course) the installer doesn't see those no matter what. For what it's worth, the SATA controller BIOS loads fine and reports the new drive capacity correctly, it's only the Win7 installer that can't seem to figure out what to do with it.

Unfortunately the onboard SATA implementation is broken (1st generation VIA SATA chipset) and will crash the computer at boot if non-SATA150 drives are attached to it.

I'm kind of surprised there aren't generic storage drivers on the install disc, it wasn't an uncommon chipset for SATA RAID in the K8 era :-?

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