So I screwed up the file system on my OS disk (damn RAID card...). I thought, what the hell, I'll install an RC of Vista.

Well it's running pretty well on my 3.5 year old machine right now, but I'm facing one problem and I'm wondering if someone here could help with a problem I'm running into.

In short: surprisingly, all of my hardware has installed correctly...except hard drives. I find that funny.

I have no PATA drives, only SATA drives. Two of them, including the OS drive, are on the motherboard, and two of them are on a PCI controller card. The OS drive must be working properly, because, well, Windows is running and I'm typing this message on my computer. But I see no other drives in Explorer. I see no [un]formatted drives in Disk Management. I do see the following in Device Manager:


When I check the properties for any of those drives, it just says that it's "working properly."

I know it's Vista, so this is a little uncharted, but does anyone have any ideas?

Just for a little additional info, the controller cards appear to be installed just fine, and have drivers listed in Device Manager.

ps- those other "Unknown devices" in that image are just USB hubs.

You probably [SECURITY PROMPT, DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?] need to find [ARE YOU SURE YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?] Vista certified SATA [ARE YOU REALLY REALLY SURE?] controller drivers for the system.

(Sorry, couldn't resist poking at the annoying "feel good" security prompt crap in Vista).

Check the motherboard makers site and the SATA controller site for possible drivers that may work with Vista. Odds are the motherboard is running the boot drive in a sort of compatibility mode to get the OS booted.

You are so totally right about that damn prompt. My favorite so far is when it prompts you to tell you that only administrators can access something, when I'm logged in as an administrator. Pretty funny.

Too bad. I've already looked at the site for the controller card (Promise surprisingly doesn't appear to have anything for Vista yet). I can't imagine that I'll find anything for the mobo SATA controller. ASUS barely has drivers for the A7N8X anymore.

You might be right about the compatibility mode. It appears that at the moment, I can't boot Vista without the installation CD in the drive I installed from. Otherwise, it says it can't find a boot disk.

Um...might I be running into trouble if I'm running RC1? I downloaded this directly from MS. I figured I'd be getting the latest release. Isn't RC2 out?

I only ask because I'm certain I found the proper driver for my controller card here. But when I try to update the driver for that device, it says that it can't find any drivers in the location I point it to. That page specifically states RC2, not RC1.

Go into the properties for the device and search for the PCI vendor ID and device ID and make sure the unknown devices are actually what you think they are... Other than that, good luck.

Matthew

I have to agree with you. After less than a week of playing with Vista RC1, it's painfully obvious that this is not a huge step forward. There are times when I'm impressed by some of the cool new features, and others when it just feels like a skinned copy of XP.

It's tough, because I really like the look of the OS. I think they've really improved that. Aero is nice, although I can't run it on my system, because you have to have a certain amount of video memory for certain resolutions. I apparently need 256MB for 2560x1600. If I bump it down to 1280x800 I can see all the Aero visuals, though.

So I'm torn. On the one hand, I like the OS and it seems faster than XP. On the other, I'm having just a few compatability problems that wouldn't exist with XP. Hmm, I'll have to think about it (and the answer, for me at least, is not Linux ).