a little help with a new MB

SPEEDemon1

Baseband Member
Messages
72
Hello everyone,

I recently purchased a new motherboard, a MSI K9N2 Platinum, to replace my Asus M2n-E sli board. I also purchased a 1 terabyte WD HD. Everything is now hooked up, and mostly everything is working correctly. Part of the reason why I upgraded to a new board was the need for more sata connectors. Now, here comes the problem. I can get sata ports 1 through 4 to function correctly and recognize my hard drives and disk drives. Sata ports 5 and 6 are giving me problems. The board essentially won't recognize them. I looked through the board's reviews on newegg, and it seems as though you need to have raid turned on to access all six ports(load of BS i know). I felt that there would be a way around this, so I started changing settings in the BIOS. I realized that when I change the sata controller to raid, all six ports become available, but I'm am not using raid, so it is of no use to me. I then changed the sata controller to ACHI, and all six ports were recognized, but I can't get the system to boot properly as it doesn't recognize the drives. I found out that I need to install drivers(through f6) while installing the OS, to allow ACHI mode to work for me. I also read though that it is difficult to get ahold of ACHI drivers(i will be dual booting xp pro 64-bit and vista home premium 32-bit). Also, i'm not 100% sure what ACHI is, and how it will affect my computers performace.

I was also thinking to just bite the bullet and go raid 0, but, I would raid my RaptorX 150 gb and my VelociRaptor 150 gb. I know that the first is SataI, and the second SataII, so would it be advisable to do a raid 0 setup?

I'm just kind of at a loss heer, as I need access to the 5th and 6th sata ports, but I'm not really sure what to do at this point. Any advice/information would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Speedy
 
As long as they have SATA ports, they will go into RAID. They will both match the speed of the slower drive.
 
It's possible that ports 5/6 are strictly designed for RAID and not supported under non-RAID circumstances.
 
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