PC Hanging on XP start up.

[sinister_monk]

I've got and old PC (P4 1.7GHz) in which I've installed a VT6421 raid card.
The computer will boot fine into XP when there are no drives attached to it, but when I attach a sata drive it hangs during booting.

Can anyone give me some advice please?

TIA

[TotallyRandom]

Have you installed the latest divers for you card?

try a different PCI slot.

dose the hard drive run ok off the board?

Try the card in another system if possible might have a dud card

[sinister_monk]

Thanks for reply

Yes, I downloaded latest driver from Via site, after the first time it hung.
Cannot test drive from onboard as it is old IDE system, (so are other desktops). The sata drive itself has been remove from a USB disk enclosure that worked just fine.
I'm gonna try it in a different system today, so I'll see how that goes.

[Mickey]

Will it boot up into safe mode ?

Prob alter a setting in the bios maybe the sata tries to boot before the raid

[neilcritc]

you might find the age of the machines means it will not work with both sata and ide... I would recommend running it through usb(drive), as that worked previously. If you have usb1 you could buy a pci usb2 card for about a tenner

[sinister_monk]

thanks guys,

No, same symptoms in my other desktops.
It won't boot in safemode either.

Maybe my machines are to old?
Not sure where to go with this, any other suggestions?

[sinister_monk]

I think I've sussed out what's going on here.
After a bit of research it appears that the VT6421 chipset is not compatible with SATA II drives.
And I'm trying to attach two WD scorpio 2.5" drives, that happen to be SATA II, I can only find instructions on how to jumper 3.5" drives back to SATA I.
Does anyone know if I can make the drives SATA I or failing that recommend a cheap controller card that support both IDE and SATA II (doesn't have to be raid)
Cheers