D845PEBT2 MOBO hangs up booting SATA

  • Thread starter Thread starter roger
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roger

I have a friend with a Intel D845PEBT2 MOBO that hangs up booting when
trying to boot off an SATA drive.

He says his mobo has 2 SATA connections on it, but he can't boot from
it, because the bios will hang up in bootup when he sets it to boot
off a SATA drive. With the IDE devices going by the wayside and what
is left of them to purchase being more expensive than SATA devices, he
is kind of backed into a corner.


Anyone have advice?

Big Fred
 
roger wrote:
(Don't use domains even in a bogus e-mail that you don't own or do not
have permission to use.)
(An e-mail address is not a nym. Use a proper syntaxed From header.)
I have a friend with a Intel D845PEBT2 MOBO that hangs up booting when
trying to boot off an SATA drive.

He says his mobo has 2 SATA connections on it, but he can't boot from
it, because the bios will hang up in bootup when he sets it to boot
off a SATA drive. With the IDE devices going by the wayside and what
is left of them to purchase being more expensive than SATA devices, he
is kind of backed into a corner.
Click to expand...

And at just what point does his computer "hang"? Does it get past the
POST screen? Does the OS even start to load? Does he get a message
after the POST saying no boot device found? WHAT happens?

Did your friend ever bother to change the BIOS so its boot device order
included a SATA device? What other boot devices have higher priority
(floppy/removable, optical/CD, USB, etc)?

"Hangs" when trying to use a SATA device does not say it boots okay when
using an IDE device.
 
I have a friend with a Intel D845PEBT2 MOBO that hangs up booting when
trying to boot off an SATA drive.

He says his mobo has 2 SATA connections on it, but he can't boot from
it, because the bios will hang up in bootup when he sets it to boot
off a SATA drive. With the IDE devices going by the wayside and what
is left of them to purchase being more expensive than SATA devices, he
is kind of backed into a corner.


Anyone have advice?

Big Fred
Click to expand...

There is a simple answer to this.
But as usual, I'll drag it out.

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/15337/eng/D845PEBT2_TechProdSpec.pdf

The board has an ICH4 Southbridge. Which doesn't have SATA.

They added a SIL3112a to support SATA. A separate chip.

The motherboard BIOS, has drivers in it for each "outboard"
chip. The 845PE/ICH4, the main BIOS does what is needed for
that. The BIOS developer though, to support the SIL3112a,
he takes the code module he gets from Silicon Image and
adds that to the BIOS.

The Silicon Image BIOS code, has a bug at the 750GB mark. If you
connect a 1TB drive, it makes the whole motherboard freeze
during POST.

To fix it, you need to upgrade the motherboard BIOS, to
one which contains a later version of the Silicon Image
code. Once you do that, the motherboard will stop freezing
during POST when the SATA is connected.

If your friend uses a "small" SATA drive, like a 320GB one,
chances are that would work for a test. But any really
big drives (like 4TB SATA), you're going to need to upgrade
the BIOS for that to work.

On some Asus motherboards, about eight different BIOS
releases, all had the same version of Silicon Image
code. Eventually, a fixed one was releases. For those
users, they needed patience, because it took forever
before the bug was corrected. I don't know if Intel
is that conscientious or not. They might easily
not fix it. And all it takes, is substituting a
different SIL3112a BIOS module, about 5 minutes work
for somebody.

Some users I've talked to, they used things like mmtool,
to add their own Silicon Image code to the BIOS. But
that is fraught with perils. If you wanted to go
in such a direction (edit BIOS yourself), you
would need a BIOS Savior (duplicate flash chip),
to protect yourself. If you have a BIOS Savior,
then all things are possible. Without a BIOS Savior,
you could easily brick the motherboard while doing
your experiments.

While I've used BIOS editing tools, I never actually
loaded my images into the motherboard. Because the
BIOS editing tools "made me nervous". They weren't
displaying status information correctly, which made
me think there was something wrong with the images
I'd made. And I didn't want to brick a motherboard
to find out.

If you brick a motherboard doing stuff like that,
you can easily get out of it, by using the
services of badflash.com. That site, and a couple
others like it, provide flashing services and a new
BIOS chip. As long as the BIOS chip is socketed,
then you can recover from a bad flash upgrade.
And the D845PEBT2 does have a brown square PLCC
socket for easy BIOS chip replacement. I checked
a picture.

Paul
 
I have given him the URL for this thread. Hopefully he can so0lve his
problem Thanks

BF
Click to expand...

The Intel site is not responding, on the page with the files.
I had to use the archive.org site, to get a response. And that
ends up taking me here.

BIOS update [BT84520A.86A]

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/De...eng&OSVersion= &DownloadType=

These are the release notes for the BIOS releases. This
will allow you to figure out roughly when the BIOS
were released.

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/5519/eng/Archive_Notes.rtf

The usual endless document with details on how to flash
upgrade the BIOS.

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/5519/eng/BIOS Update Readme.pdf

To get the BIOS update, you need to scroll your browser screen sideways,
until the "Download" button is visible on the right. Click that,
to see the license agreement screen.

When you click the "I accept..." button, the 8MB download begins.

This is where the file comes from, but you can't get it without
agreeing to the license, so this link isn't of any real value.

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/5519/eng/BT84520A.86A_archive.zip

It turns out, the BIOS is actually from 2003! <--- OOPS

The release notes say P01-0005 is the release with SIL 4.1.36
SATA code in it. Now, we need some info as to which release
fixed the 1TB bug.

This thread, indicates the system BIOS needs to have
4.2.50 or 4.2.84 version.

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread....age-3112A-Bios-A7N8X-Deluxe-(2-0)-Users/page3

This page says:

https://web.archive.org/web/2009021....com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=63&cat=15

"SiI3112 IDE, SATARAID and system BIOS 7/7/2005 4.2.50 69 kb"
"SiI3112 IDE, SATARAID and system BIOS 12/3/2007 4.2.84 120 kb"

Since the official BIOS stopped updating in 2003,
and the bug fix is from 2005, the only hope
now is a search for

"D845PEBT2 modded BIOS"

In other words, Intel did not issue a BIOS update
with a fixed 3112a code module.

You would need to find one of those, to get
SATA working with large drives. Someone would need to
take the 2003 BIOS, with some kind of modding tool,
and add a 4.2.50 or later Silicon Image file to it.
I don't know what tool you use for Intel BIOS.
Which is a reason to not buy Intel motherboards.
Intel motherboards are used in some OEM machines,
so you can't always escape them.

Back in the day, with my motherboard, Ben was doing
CBROM mods for this sort of thing. And he didn't
brick his Asus motherboard. So he managed to find
a tool to do the job. I ended up downloading a
modded BIOS from elsewhere (Germany?) which
also had a fix for memory problems.

http://www.ben.pope.name/a7n8x_faq.html#SATA_Update

The bottom line is, you have to get real lucky,
to find just the right BIOS fix for this
stuff. I got a second motherboard fix from
Germany as well, for my Asrock board. Works
like a champ. There were certain things that
Asrock simply would not fix, and I suspect a
certain evil company and its lawyers, played a part
in tying the hands of Asrock developers.

*******

It may be easier to buy a PCI SATA card and plug it in,
then connect the >1TB drive to that and use it.

This SIL3124 based card, would transfer data at
a max of 110MB/sec or so. Even though the drive could
be 135MB/sec and the cabling is 300MB/sec. THe PCI bus
is the bottleneck and limits the burst transfer rate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124028

Another option, is to use a IDE to SATA dongle. This
is the one I own. This isn't the perfect design
(the pins are easy to bend), but functionally
it's been great. The drives worked OK. If you
leave this adapter attached to the cable, it
should be fine.

StarTech IDE2SAT IDE to SATA Drive Mounted Adapter $17
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200156

You set the Master/Slave jumper on the adapter, to
fool the ribbon cable into thinking a Master or
Slave IDE disk is connected. The connector on the
front of the module, plugs directly into the SATA
drive. Transfer rate is limited to the speed of the
IDE ribbon. On Intel, that's 100MB/sec read and
something like 89MB/sec on writes. The weird number
of 89MB/sec is due to how the timing strobe is
generated for the cable. Intel didn't bother
joining the 133MB/sec standard on IDE.

Paul
 
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