urgent help needed. who's knows the K7N2 mobo??

[silent]

hi

building a machine for a mate, everything connected properly, but the thing will not boot past the first screen which states the sata raid array thing.

now, i have an msi k7n2 mobo with an xp2500 barton core. i originally went into the bios and changed fsb to 200, but nothing else was changed.

i have bought him a 160gig SATA maxtor HDD and connected it to mobo. do i have to use 2 hdd's with sata or can i have just the one?

it freezes when i press anything, but twice when i left it, it came up with boot from cd: but wouldn't let me do ouwt. could i need to somehow try and get into the bios and select boot floopy first, which is what i thought i had done, or am i missing something like a jumper setting?? i have read the manual's 3-4 times but the sata one says nowt about single drive's, just about RAID functions.

also, is this the worst designed mobo ever or is it just me? tis a pain to put the additional firewire adaptors in the back bit's as they have all jumpers and things pooking out of the thing!


please help someone. will i have to buy a normal ata133 hdd for him instead?

this mobo

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=47974

[Howard]

I didn't know this board had SATA...?

[silent]

it's the k7n2 delta - ilsr

this one

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=47974

[Byatt]

have you tried getting the latest s-ata chipset driver (should be a silicon image one iirc) and installing that before connecting the hard disk? I seem to remember there were some problems with the s-ata on some nforce-2s where the driver for the chipset was buggered...

...you might want to wait for someone a bit more certain to back me up though

[atifds9]

just a thought, i have the cut down basic version of that and i'm in the middle of trying to overclock it, i set the fsb to 200 for my twinmoss ddr 400 ram but at this point it went funny and would freeze on boot up and in the bios, so i switched off at the back and set it to 166 for 333 ddr and it seems stable at this. I'll now try increasing the fsb in increments of 10 currently got the multiplpier at 10 as well so it's running much cooler.

[silent]

set up is now running. i changed the fsb back and attached a cable differently and it now seems to work. well, i had to leave win xp installing and come back to work.

[floppybootstomp]

I've got that motherboard, but I'm just using the IDE ports, have two IDE HDD's fitted and two optical drives.

I installed the RAID drivers during XP install at the F6 prompt, and I get the option to go into the RAID menu at boot.

Together with the two SATA RAID connectors, there's a normal IDE port and I thought I could run another hard disk on that, but it seems not.

It was recognised within the RAID setup menu, I had to set it as 'Spare Disk' but it doesn't show within Win XP.

Not much help, really, more of a question, but, could I actually use that third IDE port for a single disk?

[silent]

i would have thought you would have been able to use the 3rd ide slot for any drive/HDD. just set em as slaves.

[BUFF]

Originally posted by floppybootstomp
Together with the two SATA RAID connectors, there's a normal IDE port and I thought I could run another hard disk on that, but it seems not.

It was recognised within the RAID setup menu, I had to set it as 'Spare Disk' but it doesn't show within Win XP.

Not much help, really, more of a question, but, could I actually use that third IDE port for a single disk?

The manual says that you can connect the 2 SATA & 1 IDE device.
However, you can only use 2 devices in RAID on that controller.

Have you formatted & partitioned the IDE drive?

[floppybootstomp]

Originally posted by BUFF
Have you formatted & partitioned the IDE drive?

BUFF:

Yes, I have. It's formatted in NTFS, as are the other two HDD's I'm using.

I can see my two HDD's and optical drives in WIN XP, on IDE's 1 & 2, but not the third one on IDE 3.

I have it set as Master, I wonder if using Cable Select or Slave would make any difference?

[BUFF]

I don't have 1 of these boards (was thinking about it) but I do have the .pdf manual. I don't have the SATA RAID manual though.

According to the manual you can only have 2 devices on RAID but you say that you have the 3rd in the RAID menu.
What's the bet that Windows can't see it because you have it in the RAID setup?

I presume that you have Onchip IDE channel enabled in Integrated peripherals?

[floppybootstomp]

BUFF: Yes, both onchip IDE channels ( 0 & 1) enabled, everything is on auto.

It's not really that much of a biggie anyway, I have an 80Gb & 60Gb in there, it's just that I have a spare 20Gb IBM drive I couldda filled up with mp3's or something.

I really think I should RTFM, I'm curious now. I tried this thing initially, when setting up the board. Now I've been using it a coupla weeks, I'll take some time to read more about the RAID setup and functions on this board.

Thanks for your input