vista and 939Dual-SATA2

hello,
I'm helping my friend install windows vista on his machine, and we can't get vista to detect his hard drive. Apparently Vista thinks that we need to install a raid driver. this is kind of stupid because we disabled raid in the bios. Any work arounds? we tried almost all the sata/hdd combinations in the bios and still vista refuses to detect the hard drive.

He has a 939Dual-SATA2 mobo and a seagate hdd.
*also this same problem occurs with windows xp. though it works because he can install a raid driver, but there is no raid driver for vista! .
thanks

-shahsmerdis

Isn't there the raid option before you start installing Vista? I don't have retail Vista, but if I remember correctly for the BETA, there is an install option where you can specify from where the raid drivers are. Also, I believe you can use the XP raid drivers for Vista.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/download.asp?Model=939Dual-SATA2

Yes but those are Xp drivers they don't work for vista. The point is i am not suppose to have to use raid drivers. Windows should just detect it, regardless of raid.

I'm reading through some other sites, it seems if you're using an AGP card with the motherboard and Vista, it causes some problems, it has something to do with the AGP drivers. With the raid drivers, did you guys actually attempt to install the XP drivers with Vista or are you just saying it's XP so it won't work (regardless if you should need it or not). I know for my NF4 before the Vista drivers came out, I could just use the XP RAID drivers and it worked fine. Also, you might want to see if there is an update for the motherboard bios, since you stated that you guys disabled it, but it's still being read as in RAID, which was happening in XP, too. Chances are it's looking just for the SATA drivers that Vista/XP doesn't have. Those SATA drivers are tied to the RAID drivers.

AGP has nothing to do with vista/xp not detecting the hard drive. That is a problem while trying to run vista. Now i should be able to boot from the cd/dvd and it should detect my hard drive i should not have to do anything else. I have disabled raid and it still doesn't work. Using the xp raid driver works with Xp, but it doesn't work with vista. I remember when i first tried to install xp on this computer it required no driver at all.

thanks

-shahsmerdis

That's understandable if the drivers are to be included in Vista that you wouldn't need external drivers. However, if you look on the ASRock website you'll see that this board is not Vista-compliant (they have a VSTA version of the board). I'm not saying it won't work, there might be workarounds. I've also read that there is a SATA/IDE mode switcher for the mobo. You could try turning those from SATA to IDE to see if it reads. I've read that the switcher is basically a difference of needing drivers (SATA) to no drivers (IDE). So, when you first installed anything on the board it might have been in IDE mode and when or if you updated the bios (reset to default) it might have switched to mode back to SATA, which would then require a driver.

Well i got it working. apparently the other IDE drive that was installed on the machine, even though disabled in the bios was still giving us problems. now it works flawlessly.