Read GPT hard disk on Windows XP

[Andalu]

4 minutes ago, Dave-H said:

Is that the one I've ordered?

It is not that one. I had pointed it out to you but you prefer Startech products and unfortunately it is not listed on their site.

[Dave-H]

Ah, OK.
I hope the Startech one I ordered will do the job.
I'm not intending to try and boot from it.
Cheers, Dave.

[D.Draker]

11 hours ago, jaclaz said:

My guess  is that the one Andalu has is similar to this one:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/165040641302

(a tad bit cheaper , if it is the right card )

jaclaz

Yes, it's indeed the card I bought in 2018 (but it was even cheaper), I think it's the cheapest option, as of now. The only difference, in mine they got the usual caps replaced with ceramics.

[jaclaz]

I was joking, but not much.

Seriously, I don't think that such a bracket actually exist as "standard", but essentially it is a small piece of metal sheet that can be fabricated easily with a minimum amount of tools at home, AFAIK half-height brackets are just the sane, the bottom part (and holes for ports) are in the same position, it is the top that is shorter, i.e. - reversed - this non-existing adapter from half height to full:

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1108047-low-profile-bracket-adapters/

exemplifies the point.

The tricky part is making the holes for the square/rectangular (e-sata in your case) ports, what I do when doing any of my half-@§§ed mods is to cut away the bent part at the top of the original bracket, drill a couple of holes and bolt the bracket to a suitable hand made bracket, with larger (and not-so-accurate) holes for the ports/connectors.

Now, only for the fun of it, would you believe that a site:

http://www.bracket.com/

exists?

jaclaz

 

 

[Dave-H]

This is the half height bracket that was sent with the incorrect card I received.

It should do the job I think, as the 'top bit' is definitely shorter than on a normal bracket, so hopefully the card will hang in the air high enough above the PCI-X socket below it to enable the PCI-E extender to go underneath it.

I have spoken to the people I ordered the card from, and sent them a picture of the incorrect card.
Hopefully they will come back soon to let me know if they can send the right one. Naughty I know, but if they want the other card back, I'm going to quietly keep that half height bracket just in case I can't find the right card supplied with one!

 

 

[jaclaz]

Google this:

the labgores guide to converting full height pci

jaclaz

[Dave-H]

I'm rather hoping that I don't have to do that!

[Dave-H]

The saga continues, I'm afraid.
The people I ordered the card from are still trying to let me know whether their warehouse can actually supply the card I ordered!
The PCI-E 'extender' I ordered still hadn't arrived several days after the last quoted delivery date.
I reported this to eBay, and sent a message to the seller.
It was supposedly despatched on January 31st, but is not recorded as delivered.
I heard nothing, until I got a message from eBay saying my money had been refunded.
I then ordered another one from a different source.
Then, I got a message from the original seller apologising for the fact I'd not received the first one, saying he'd refunded the money, and he was sending another one!
Oh dear!
So, it looks as if I'm going to end up with two extenders, possibly three if the original one now arrives!
I'll get there eventually!

[jaclaz]

The slack time in the GANNT chart for that project has been exceeded, we will have to either shorten the time dedicated to testing or delay the completion date.

You (the British) often fail to appreciate the usefulness of Latin time.

Project estimated duration: 5 days

Translated to Latin time: 10 weeks

(double the amount and pass to the next larger unit)

We are all well within the deadline.

jaclaz

Edited February 10 by jaclaz

[Dave-H]

Getting there!
I now have two 'risers', and the correct eSATA card is now on its way to me!

Just a quick question about the risers.
They both have power connectors on them. One has more than the other, and that's the one I will use as it's physically slightly lighter.
Am I right in assuming that those power connectors are there because the unit is designed to work with power-hungry powerful gaming graphics cards, which need more power than the PCI-E connector can provide? If so I guess I almost certainly won't need to connect them for my use.

[jaclaz]

 

From what I understand it needs to be connected to power.

There are three types, as seen:

1) flat cable (that has all wires)

2) flat cable (that has all wires) with additional power connector (for power hungry devices)

3) Usb 3.0 extender (the one you have) that need external power as the USB cables has only nine wires, according to the already posted article, PCI uses 14 pins for data (but 6 of them are ground), so 14-6=8+1=9 there are no wires available for power.

[Dave-H]

Yes, I'm sure that's right. I did wonder whether the USB lead connection could carry power as well as the data.
I can try it out with my existing card, and I might do that tomorrow just to confirm.

 

[Dave-H]

@Andalu @jaclaz

OK, back at last!
The correct card finally arrived, and I put it in yesterday.
The first problem I ran into, which I should have anticipated of course, was that there was actually no physical room to get the riser in!
It would need quite a big space between the installed cards to get it in between two of them, and it just isn't there.

I looked at mounting the riser elsewhere, and running a cable to it, but I then thought that maybe, as they are just changed over by passive physical jumpers, the SATA and eSATA sockets on the new card are in fact electronically the same, just with different connector types.
So, I put the card in where the other Silicon Image one had been, where the eSATA ports are physically inaccessible, and connected my Blu-ray drive and HDD enclosure to the two SATA ports. Fortunately, I did have a backplate with two eSATA sockets on it with cables to connect them to internal SATA ports, so I could use that for the HDD.

It works! I'm pretty sure that this would not have worked with the Silicon Image card, as I did try connecting the HDD enclosure to the SATA port on that, and it didn't work as an eSATA port, i.e. with hot-swap capability. With the new card, it seems to be fine.

So, all's well that ends well with that, I've just now got two risers which I don't need, but they were pretty cheap, so I'm not too worried about it!

So, the physical problem seems to be sorted, but there are still a couple of configuration anomalies (aren't there always?!)

I used the recommended v2.0.4 driver on XP. The disk that came with the card claimed to have an XP compatible driver on it, but I didn't use that because @Andalu said the v2.0.4 driver was the best one to use here. I did use the later driver on the disk (2.0.8 from 2014) for Windows 10, which is fine.

The problem is that the Blu-ray drive and the HDD are being seen as removable devices, with a 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon now permanently in the system tray on both XP and 10.
That in itself is not a real problem of course, certainly not with the HDD, which isn't always present anyway, but the Blu-ray drive is now not appearing in the boot devices list in the machine BIOS, which means that I wouldn't be able to boot from it. That could indeed be an issue if I ever needed to, of course. This did not happen with the Silicon Image card, when the Blu-ray drive was connected to the SATA port on that it appeared normally and was in the BIOS boot devices list.

There is an option in Device Manager on XP for the card, which is presumably supposedly to remove the 'Safely Remove Hardware' option.
It was enabled by default. I've tried switching it off, as you can see, but it's made absolutely no difference, the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon is still there!
That option is not there at all on the Windows 10 driver.

Any ideas?
Thanks, Dave.

[Andalu]

@Dave-H

Hi,

I'm glad to know that you got the asmedia card and were able to find a way to install it in your system

Just to get a better understanding:

1) is your 3TB GPT disk included in the USB3 box recognized correctly in XP when connected to the asmedia card via eSATA cable?

2) are you sure the version of the asahci32.sys driver you installed is 2.0.4?  I only have the asstor32.sys driver v2.0.4 but it doesn't allow GPT disk recognition on my systems. What version do you have installed?

For the asmedia card similar to yours even the most updated driver asahci32.sys v3.2.0 can be installed. It can be found at station-drivers.com (the driver package is ASM106x 3.3.2.0).

I have tried connecting a dvd-rom drive to the internal sata port of the above card and it shows up in the systray as a removable drive with both the asahci32.sys driver v2.0.3.2 and v3.2.0 so this seems to be a characteristic of every asmedia driver. The same dvd-rom drive however is regularly detected as a boot drive in the bios of my asus Z790 board but other boot drives however were not detected as such on another motherboard (MSI Z590) so the behavior may change from board to board.

Edited February 18 by Andalu

[Dave-H]

Thanks @Andalu.

The  hard drive in the enclosure does seem to be recognised correctly and works fine.
It is connected to one of the SATA ports though, not one of the eSATA ports.
My Blu-ray drive is connected to the other SATA port on the card.

The version of asahci32.sys installed is 2.0.3.1, is that the wrong one?

Strange about the DVD/Blu-ray drives.
On my system, it does not appear as a bootable device when connected via the Asmedia card.
It did appear as a bootable device when connected via the previous Silicon Image card though.