depending on your motherboard and your sata controller (silicon image, promise, etc) there are different methods.
When you set up and enable RAID/SATA in the BIOS the drives may not show up as regular drives in the POST but will show up in the RAID BIOS, after the post.
If your motherboard is more than a year old, this may explain why you can't see it. Inside the RAID settings there should be an option for SATA or RAID functions, make sure this is SATA.
On newer motherboards, the drives appear in the usual place, where the PATA drives are also detected but only if set to IDE and not RAID in the BIOS.
You only need a floppy to set up the drives if you are installing Windows on a SATA/RAID drive. If Windows is already running, then you should only need to make sure that hardware manager can see the controller and then activate and format the drive in administrative tools/computer management/disk management. |