Understanding Chipsets

[Clarence]

Just the other day I was formatting and re installing my OS on a tower i had over a period of time. Only to come across the error that no drive was present to load OS on during the process. It asked to load driver (which i found out later to be the chipset driver) I was told by my senior to download the chipset for the mobo.

I was also having an issue where i would format a drive on one machine and try to load it on another but only to get the windows splash screen and then it would cut off - research told me that the chipsets from one board cannot work on another since the drive loads these chipsets.

I would like to understand these chipsets a little more and how they relate to to
functioning of the Hard drives.

Regards

 

[cb600fshornet]

I'd have thought it would have been some sort of SATA III drivers, the best explanation I can think of is that most modern boards come with native/integrated SATA II controllers. SATA III controllers tend to be through a different controller (for example, Marvell), and the Windows installation doesn't natively ship with those drivers, therefore, any hard drives connected to the SATA III ports will not be recognised until the SATA III drivers are installed.

The SATA III drivers (as you've found) will be available on the internet for download and on the drivers CD that came with the motherboard.

 

[Celegorm]

Chipsets are more than just SATA ports. Likely what you really needed was the RAID/AHCI drivers and not the chipsets.

Anyways to answer your question:

Chipsets do much much more than just manage SATA. They can generally be broken down into 2 segments. Northbridge and Southbridge. Northbridge typically controls the CPU RAM and some of the graphics (think, do I use integrated or external graphics). The southbridge manages PCI/AGP/PCI-e slots, SATA, PATA (also known as IDE), audio and I think other accessory connections like USB.

Actually, the best solution listed here sums it up pretty well:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/289303-30-north-bridge-south-bridge