A8N-E doesnt like Seagate SATA 7200.9 drives

[Agent]

Do you have the latest mobo BIOS ?

[da_ging]

why are you using the F6 flopppy disk at all during startup? have you tried it without installing that

[Hottentot]

Hello Zak33

No need to hit F6 if you are using XP with SP2. Should just install as per normal. Anyway thats what mine did. (same mobo)

[scrandman]

Above is correct. With the nForce4 chipset, the SATA drivers are native to the chipset. You only need to install drivers if you are going to be running drives in a RAID array.

[scrandman]

.........and looking at them, I wouldn't know how. No jumpers on it. one last connector that is'nt used, but no logo to explain

According to this it's probably the jumper you are looking at:

http://www.itreviews.co.uk/hardware/h887.htm

After a call to Seagate we slipped a jumper on two contacts on the drive to force it to run at 150Mb/second and our nForce4 SLI motherboard found it without any problem. We also ran the Seagate on a new Intel 975X motherboard and it ran at full speed without any problem. We couldn't see any difference in performance between the two settings and we found the problem quite frustrating.

[Zak33]

right...so I dont need the SATA drivers that come on the CD?

Reason I did this was because.....well....I thought I'd need them to make it work. Have on previous installs.

Yes it's SP2, so I'll try that.
Away from my PC at the mo, playing Lineage II at a mates...back later to try

BIOS: Agent, I've not been able to download the mobo BIOS from Asus, as I was trying to use the Asus FLash installer thingy withini Windows, and their servers are alwaya full

[Zak33]

Of course we were interested to see if these theoretical benefits shone through to the real world, but what we actually found was that we couldn't install Windows as the installation routine didn't detect the 500GB drive correctly. This seems to be a problem with each new version of Serial ATA as we hit problems with incompatibilities between motherboard chipsets and hard drives

that is interesting scandman. I'll look into it if the rest fails!

[scrandman]

BIOS: Agent, I've not been able to download the mobo BIOS from Asus, as I was trying to use the Asus FLash installer thingy withini Windows, and their servers are alwaya full

CAUTION!!!!

Never use the "update BIOS from internet" option. This is almost 99% guaranteed to kill your BIOS chip. Always download it onto your hard drive (best to go through the downloads page anyway), then use the "update BIOS from file" option.

There have been many tales of ASUS users inadvertantly killing their boards with this option.

[Zak33]

yeah..was trying to do that, but the server is alwaya busy

gotta be in Windows first though....did all that back on my old SCSI drives pre new hard drives

[Zak33]

now we are making progress at last

You were all right about not using the F6 function for single drive installs...using the XP ones it worked but only on the latest Firmware.

Have now configured a RAID array, and need BOTH of the drivers from that floppy. I tried it just with the RAID only ones and XP install couldn't see the array.

Which means.....I have a totally different situation to when I built Auran's PC< which would ONLY install using the drivers on floppy, from the Asus CD.

Very weird, but very relived to see XP going in ok (so far)

Hopefully this is solved now....hopefully thanks guys for your help

[Agent]

I give him 10 mins

[dave87]

Hopefully this is solved now....hopefully thanks guys for your help

So no cheap slightly used drives for sale?

EDIT - We should really be less helpful

[Zak33]

It's working so far but as Agent says....don't hold ya breath when I'm involved...you never know what might occur

Speed difference in RAID is good

I'll do another thread in HardStuff on figures

[scrandman]

Glad you seem to have got it sorted now.

Much simpler method - buy Samsung drives!