SATA disc not recognized by Windows

[Roby]

I have a motherboard with a Pentium CPU. The motherboard has PCI slots, connectors for IDE and floppy. I bought a PCI adapter for two SATA hard drives and connected the Kingston SSD to the first SATA. When booting, the computer recognizes Kingston as a hard drive. Also visible in setup. The problem lies with the Windows installation. Windows stops the installation and reports “No hard drive in this computer”.

[electrohebdo]

maybe the SATA expansion card is not bootable. You need to install Windows on a standard IDE drive (C:). SATA disks are used as D: and E:. Another solution, if you don't like to use IDE hard drive, try installing PXI SCSI adapter and connect a SCSI drive as C:.

[Fox]

SATA add-on-boards are mostly bootable only for SSD or non-bootable. I have one SATA PCI board. This board booted only from SSD but not from standard SATA drive.

[Yoshi]

Does the SATA expansion card have a BIOS or is it just a dummy SATA card?

[Roby]

The SATA card doesn't have a BIOS, or it seems like there isn't. I did a test, bought a vintage IDE hard drive and connected it to the motherboard. Success, the computer booted and I was able to install the operating system. When installing the operating system, I reconnected the SATA drive to the additional SATA card. At first, before the OS boot, the disk was listed, but the OS (MS Windows) doesn't know about it. I don't know if SATA board need a Windows driver.

[Roby]

I removed the SATA card from the computer. The SATA card is labeled “PCI-X RAID 5” Made in Taiwan. It has four SATA connectors labeled P1…P4. On the board are two chips. The first comes from Silicon Image, the second is smaller from PMC, type Pm39LV040-70JCE. I used this card in a PCI slot on ASUS A7N8X-VM motherboard. If I connect a SATA hard disk to P1, the disk is recognized during boot, but Windows doesn't know this. Previously on this computer SUSE Linux was installed on a SATA SSD connected to P1.