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Dell Precision 690 Workstation multiple hard drives
I have a Dell Precision 690 and I'm trying to hook up the hard drives in the right order. The documentation says that they need to go into the HDD labeled slots on the motherboard but they don't work. The only slots that do work are the SATA slots. I have tested five SATA drives but I can only get three to work on the three SATA slots instead of the four HDD slots and the extra SATA slot like the book says to do.
I've tried enabling the SAS controller under BIOS : didn't matter if it was on or off. I've determined that AHCI cannot be enabled, it has to be ATA.
In the end I need to be able to have five hard drives total. Four in the HDD slots and one in the SATA slot. (Which will be 1 SATA for the OS and 4 SAS for RAID.) I realize that the HDD_0,1,2,3 slots are for SAS/SATA use but I can't get them too work.
Also, I dont' know if this matters or not, but it's got Windows XP Professional x64. The BIOS is A05 and I know an update is A08, I haven't done that yet though.
Anywhere I can find some hardware help would be much appreciated.
--E.Avalon (Please help.)
eavalon
2 Posts
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May 25th, 2011 17:00
Yes, there are three ports labeled as SATA (0,1,2) and four ports labeled as HDD (0,1,2,3). The manual says to connect hard drives in the HDD ports and then in the SATA ports. The first two SATA ports are for extra optical drives and the last port is used for a fifth hard drive.
I got in touch with several Dell Technical Support people and finally found the right driver to install.
Since I did not have the OEM disk that was shipped with the computer, I was doing a fresh install from a Windows disk. I needed F6 drivers (third party drivers) to enable the HDD ports before the installation took place. (And honestly I can't remember what the file was right now.)
The AHCI could not be enabled because the drives I have are Serial ATA drives and in the BIOS there's a choice between AHCI and ATA.
The problem is solved and I feel like I could take a test about this computer and become a technician for it.
--E.Avalon
osprey4
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May 24th, 2011 17:00
Hi E Avalon,
Sorry, I cannot get to the support site to check your manual. I don't understand the difference between the SATA slots and the HDD slots. Can you explain? Why can't AHCI be enabled?
osprey4
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May 25th, 2011 17:00
Good to hear. Thanks for posting the solution.
csherret
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November 6th, 2014 06:00
Any chance of remembering the file name? Dell charges $60 to help with the issue.