A7N8X-E SATA Problems - URGENT Help Needed

[Allen]

OK, have just bought a SATA drive and want to install my new Win XP Home on it. I copied the SATA drivers (from the Mobo's disk) to a floppy and set the jumper to enable SATA. Connected my new drive and booted up. After the message to create a SATA Raid setup it just freezes. Disconnected my SATA drive and rebooted and it still freezes. It won't get into the XP setup.

Any ideas please?

:edit: I have BIOS 1011 at the moment, am gonna try going back to 1008 in a minute as I'm sure it didn't freeze when SATA was enabled before!

[yamangman]

Can you tell us the manufacturer of the SATA chipset? Try an update of your A7N8X-E BIOS. I dont know a great deal about the A7N8X-E.

[Allen]

Silicon Image. I'm running the latest BIOS. Am gonna try an earlier version in a minute.

[BUFF]

Disconnect any IDE HDD's.
Make sure that "boot from CD" is further up the list than "boot from HDD" & obviously necessary SATA options are enabled.
Stick XP CD in drive, reboot & be prepared to hit F6 when asked about loading special drivers. Have floppy on hand.

There is a good guide for the NF7-S http://www.lvcoyote.com/sata.htm.
They use the same chipset/SATA controller so a lot of it will be common to both.

[Allen]

Done all of the above. Disconnected IDE drive, boot from CD was first option, enabled SATA and it freezes before the XP installation starts.

[yamangman]

Yep lots of problems with the Silicon Image controller so i've heard. Is there an update available for the actuall SI controller itself? Unfortunately (?!) I have had no problems with SATA, so I can't really help you as much as others.

[Allen]

Not sure, am looking now. How would I update it though, flash it somehow?

[BUFF]

Not sure, am looking now. How would I update it though, flash it somehow?

The SATA BIOS is part of the mobo BIOS - usually only way to update is to flash the mobo BIOS.

Are you sure that you have the right drivers extracted from the CD?

[Allen]

It doesn't matter, I can't even get to the installation where it asks for the drivers, unless I disable SATA via the mobo jumper, but then it doesn't register the HDD.

[Allen]

Sorted it now. I think there may have been some sort of incompatibility with the onboard Serial ports (which I don't use) as I just disabled them and XP is now installing.

[luap.h]

You could also check out www.nforcershq.com forum area, they may have uber BIOS' for your motherboard with updated SATA as well. Dont forget to obtain the latest drivers from the Silicon Image website. I'm not sure if I misread this, but you'll need more than one SATA drive to do the RAID, with just one drive you can ignore all calls to create a RAID