Help needed installing serial ATA Drives ...

Renegade_Chris

A Very Confused Bunny
Joined
3 Feb 2004
Messages
32
Hiyas everyone ... I really need some help with a system installation. I have been wrestling with this for over a week and am beginning to lose my rag with it ...

Have bought an Athlon 64 3000+ processor and a MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R mainboard (MS-6702), with two 160GB Maxtor Serial ATA drives (6Y160M0). Once I have installed the drives, I can't seem to get the drives to behave properly.

I can't install Win XP Home onto the Maxtor Drives at all. The system will either crash when I try to format before the copying of the system files in the installation, or the system will freeze during the installation after the first restart, reporting a bad CRC check.

I have tried to install these drives into another install of WinXP Home, on one of my old drives. The system will detect the drive, Partition Magic will create the partitions and format the drives, but when it comes to actually copying any files or installing any software onto them, the system reports that it has failed to write the information onto the drive ... and helpfully suggests that i should save my files elsewhere.

I have installed the latest SATA drivers, for both the VIA and Promise SATA controllers, and also have updated the BIOS to the latest revision. I have replaced the drives once, and the motherboard once too, and well .... I am out of ideas! Can someone suggest something I may have missed??

The full system specs are:-

Athlon 64 3000+ processor with Akasa cooler
MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R mainboard (MS-6702)
Maxtor 160GB Serial ATA drives (6Y160M0)
400W power supply
NVIDIA Geforce 4 4600 GFX card
Sony DVD-RW Drive
Sony CD-RW drive
Panasonic FDD

If anyone can help me would be very much appreciated ...

Thanx
 
Things to check:
- Is SATA set up as RAID in BIOS (rather than simple SATA ports)?
- Is the SATA RAID set up to boot in BIOS?
- Have you created abd initialized your array in whatever SATA BIOS that board uses?

If all of this has been done, it sounds like you may have a bad disk. You'll have to set up your SATA ports as normal SATA and test each drive individually.
 
scriptasylum said:
Things to check:
- Is SATA set up as RAID in BIOS (rather than simple SATA ports)?
- Is the SATA RAID set up to boot in BIOS?
- Have you created abd initialized your array in whatever SATA BIOS that board uses?

If all of this has been done, it sounds like you may have a bad disk. You'll have to set up your SATA ports as normal SATA and test each drive individually.

well, have done all three of them things .... and the same things are happening when I install them as seperate drives ... they work for copying things onto the disk, but trying to run any application from the disk and the disk just dies. I have replaced the cables with cables i know that work on another SATA machine ... I know also that both HDD work on another machine with SATA ... and this is the second board that is in the system with exactly the same error happening.

I dont mind tellin' u i am stuck ... I am on this machine at the moment, running it on old ATA hard drives, and not a problem ... I have read issues with the VIA SATA connections ... but apparently the promise controller works like a dream .... and apparently this mainboard is one of the best mainboards on the market with SATA .... I'm getting so annoyed with it i may just put a hammer thru it (no pun intended)
 
Are you by any chance overclocking? If the FSB is too high, the PCI bus may be out of spec enough to give you grief with the SATA, but may be fine with IDE. I'm sure you know that VIA chipsets use a divider for the PCI/AGP bus.

Is write-caching enabled for those drives? Disabling it will hurt performance, but it would be curious to see if that may help stability, although I don't know how that will help you much. Maybe it's already disabled? If so, try enabling it.

Judging by what you've already done, it seems like the only thing it might be is the power supply??

Not that I don't mind trying to help, but maybe a search over at amdforums.com in the MSI section might turn up something. I just did a quick search there but didn't find anything, although I didn't spend too much time searching...
 
Did you remember to load the SATA drivers in Windows Setup? and also make sure you use the newest drivers inside Windows
 
IF you can't get it to work, I'll take the system off your hands before you put a hammer thru it.. hehehe
 
maybe you should try some different drives, my seagate sata's on my intel board work beautifully.
 

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