SATA Hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jack Gruschow
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J

Jack Gruschow

My new comp is a P4 3.0 with 1024 (2x512) megs of ddr 400 ram. AND a Seagate
80 gig SATA 150 Hard disk. My m/b is a gigabyte GA-8IPE 1000 with DDR 400
and FSB 800
I am having occasional problems with cold starting the machine. Sometimes
POST is very slow. particularly the memory count. Then it checks drives.
Sometimes very fast , but other times the computer stops and displays the
message "boot disk error. press alt cnt del to reboot"
This usually corrects itself on second try.
I bought the computer without an operating system and the supplier informs
me that they treat this as a PARTS sale and they have no responsibility for
setting it up.
I installed XP Home myself without any problems and have since installed SP1
and other MS updates.
I am told I don't need any drivers for SATA as they are on the bios.??
I have set SATA to auto in cmos and have disabled IDE 1.
It seems to me that sometimes XP does not recognize SATA. ??
I have been told that drivers should be installed at the Press F6 message
during windows installation??
Any help and suggestions would be very welcome. I have never even seen one
of these drives before.
Thank you,
Jack Gruschow
 
Hi Jack

First things first -

SATA - Your mainboard uses the Intel ICH5 chipset which *fully* integrates
the SATA controller and means you don't need to introduce any third-party
SATA drivers using the F6 method - basically XP is able to use standard IDE
drivers supplied on the XP installation CD. Hope that clears that up.

But you're still having problems.

Hmmm... these are just suggestions you understand but...

Check that the SATA cabling is securely connected.

Check that you have an updated BIOS... F8 is the latest according to the
giga-byte website...

You may also want to make sure your BIOS settings are at default levels -
some BIOS allow a standardised overclocking setting that may throw a machine
that is already operating close to peak...

I would also be looking at the 2X512 MB of ddr 400 RAM.
There is a memcheck utility that will thoroughly test the memory if you have
the time to do a complete physical on the sticks .. I'm sure a quick google
will find it if another poster doesn't step in...

Your other option is to contact Gigabyte directly - I have seen issues
before with DDR 400 and Giga-byte boards that a fix was in development for
(and only available by email while testing was completed).

http://uk.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-8IPE1000.htm

The above link has info on your mainboard and associated links to drivers,
BIOS updates etc.

Hope some of this helps
Pete
 
My GB board came with SATA drivers on the supplied CDROM. I have
installed them and have not had any problems....so far. I would give
that a shot and if you still have these problems, you may just have a
flakey board. Return it and get another.
 
This is a long-shot, but simple to do: Some SATA connector do not lock
firmly in place and can result in intermittant contact. Firmly push the
SATA cable into the hrad drive, then use electrical take to hold it in
place.
 
Let me piggy-back on Bob's suggestion. I just completed building a computer
with an MSI motherboard (KT-6) which had SATA support, and I had a lot of
problems getting it to work. One of the problems turned out to be a bad SATA
cable that kept working loose, exactly as Bob described. Replacing that
cable, which came with the MSI board, with a better cable that came with my
SATA hard drive, fixed a lot of my problems. When you make the connection,
it should snap semi-firmly into place. If it pulls out too easily, you'll
have the same problems that I did.

By the way, Pete Baker gave me a lot of help, and Pete, FYI--I swapped the
SATA hard drive back from the Promise PCI board to the motherboard port like
I said I was going to, and it worked fine like that. The first time I opened
Windows explorer, I got the flashlight for a few seconds while Windows
figured out the new locations of all the drives, but that was the only
difference. I did have to change the boot sequence to make the motherboard
port the first option, but that's the only change I had to make. Thanks
again for all the help. This newsgroup is really very helpful to a lot of
people, thanks to guys like you.

Alan
 
Thank you Alan..

It's always good to know the results of any assistance given.

Glad that your SATA swap worked so smoothly..

By the way... the OP here has one of the mainboards with ICH5 (no
third-party SATA drivers and no F6 procedure) you where looking for info
on - a gigabyte GA-8IPE 1000.

Cheers
Pete
 
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