[inside-edge]

Hi to all out there.

I have a problem with installing a new 1 Tb Seagate SATA HDD. I’ve trawled this and other forums and seen that many others have similar issues, but what’s worked for those who have sorted it either doesn’t work for me or seems not to be applicable.

History:-

Mesh Matrix 64 FX-Xtra; Serial No: 5036847-001-s; Asus SK8V; Athelon FX-51; 1 Gb RAM; Win XP SP2; AMI BIOS version 08.00.09

2 existing Maxtor SATA HDD’s on SATA 1 and SATA 2 MoBo ports (VIA VT8237 controller) exactly as originally installed, configured and supplied by MESH. i.e Promise Controller disabled.

All this was working fine but the C:\ Drive (120 Gb) holding the operating system has been making horrible clicking noises and regularly crashing the PC so I’m replacing it. I backed up the drive contents to an external drive using Acronis and intended to restore it to my D:\ Drive (250Gb) making that the bootable drive and then change out the flakey one. I had some difficulty getting Partition Magic to resize and add partitions to the D:\ drive – it kept returning errors including an indication of formatting errors in the existing Partition and failing to complete, so I decided to restore the C:\ Drive image to the new drive instead and sort or scrap the old D:\ Drive afterwards.

I began by swapping the D:\ Drive for a Samsung 750 Gb SATA 2 drive straight out of the box. On boot up, the PC failed to see the new or the old SATA drives and wouldn’t boot to Windows. I checked all the connections/cables, but if I put the old D:\ drive back, it booted fine. Online forums suggested that many folk had problems getting their BIOS to see this particular Samsung Drive and Samsung website documentation was poor and contradictory so I took the drive back to the shop. There they initialised it and formatted it as unallocated space (NTFS). I tried again but still the BIOS said no drives found. I reviewed BIOS settings but there is little to alter and anyway it all works with the existing drives.

The issue appeared to be that the new SATA 2 drive has the faster data rate of 300 Mb/s which is not supported by my MoBo. Samsung blurb says this can be overcome by fitting jumpers to convert the drive to the old 150 Mb/s SATA standard, but their diagram had 8 pins vs the 4 pins on the drive. I tried all possible jumper positions but the drive was still not seen. Note that the BIOS doesn’t see my existing C:\ drive either if the new one is connected. If I connect only the old C:\ drive, it boots to Windows OK.

Samsung and other sources advice to configure the drive in the BIOS manually doesn’t work because, a) there’s nowhere to input SATA drive parameter data in the BIOS and b) Samsung don’t put the sector, block, heads data on their drive datasheet anyway !

I took it back again and changed it for a 1Tb Seagate Barracuda. The documentation and support was better, but I was still expecting to need to fit jumpers to reduce the transfer speed. The shop formatted the drive and I fitted the jumper as per Seagate instructions, …….same result, neither SATA drive is seen by the BIOS.

I’ve not updated the BIOS because the ASUS site says don’t unless you’re confident it’ll solve the problem. Since their list of BIOS mods doesn’t seem to relate to my issue, I couldn’t be sure it’d make any difference. I’ve also not installed any new Windows SATA drivers as this seems to need to be done when you install XP (not sure why, but that’s what I keep reading in the forums) and I’d rather not re-install XP when apart from this drive issue the PC works fine. In any case, it’s the BIOS that can’t see the drive – XP hasn’t had a chance to look yet !

I would be very grateful for any help and advice that’ll get this thing working. Could a BIOS update for the SATA controller chipset be the answer (the VIA VT8237 ) ? If so, where would I download it from and how would I go about installing it?

Many thanks in anticipation