Hello,
I have had the EP45 UD3P for over a year now, and realised that my hard drive was configured to use the IDE emulation, I currently have only one hard drive and although I know that i will probably not see much of a performance boost i would like to take advantage of the SATA II interface. I have a 500GB Seagate 7200.12 HDD, I would like to know if i have set up the BIOs correctly and if i have installed the storage controller correctly too, so although it may be a longer post i will hopefully get all the information required down in one go :-)
Before reinstalling Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit version, i went into my BIOs and set it up as follows;
under integrated peripherals;
SATA RAID/ AHCI Mode - [RAID]
SATA Port0-3 Native Mode - [Enabled]
Onboard SATA/IDE Device - [Enabled]
Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode - [RAID/IDE]
I then looked on intel for the latest drivers, and found this...
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=18861&lang=engHowever i didnt use the software in the above link because it says on that website;
"They can be used to create a floppy in order to pre-install the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver during the F6 portion of Windows* setup. The F6 installation method is not required for Microsoft Windows Vista* or Microsoft Windows 7*" - because i am using Windows 7
After finishing the install of Windows 7, (i haven't connected it to the internet untill all my software is on)
I installed the latest chipset driver before installing this driver on the following link -
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18859&ProdId=2101&lang=enghaving read the readme which is here just in case (
http://downloadmirror.intel.com/18859/eng/Readme.txt)
I figured that i had installed it correctly because the read me says...
"6.1 Verifying Have Disk, F6, or Unattended Installation:
depending on your system configuration, refer to the
appropriate sub-topic below:
6.1a Systems Configured for RAID Mode:
1. On the Start menu, select Control Panel.
2. Open the 'System' applet (you may first
have to select 'Switch to Classic View').
3. Select 'Hardware'
4. Click 'Device Manager'.
5. Expand the 'Storage Controllers' entry (for Windows Vista* or later) or
'SCSI and RAID Controllers' entry (for Windows XP*).
6. Right-click on Intel(R) SATA RAID Controller.
7. Select 'Properties'.
8. Select the 'Driver' tab.
9. Click 'Driver Details'.
10. If the 'iaStor.sys' file is displayed, the installation
was successful."
When looking at the driver details, i have this as described above.
So could someone please tell me if the all my BIOs are configured correctly? i realise that i do not have a SATA array but is this ok for single hard drive?
Thanks in advance and apologies for a long post
Rob
