Asrock Dual Sata 2 & Windows 7 Install

[andyrpsmith]

I wanted to help those who may have issues with a new Windows 7 install with the Asrock 939 Dual Sata 2 board.

I upgraded from XP and had two issues.

I bought a new Samsung HD SATA for a clean installation.

Windows 7 setup did not see the HDD and asked for drivers.

I started with those for XP which loaded and allowed setup to initially see the HDD, but it failed on the first reboot and I could not proceed.

The chip controlling the HDD is a JMicron 360 and the good news is that the JMicron site has an updated driver set for the JM 36X series chips which include Windows 7. Download the drivers to a USB stick.

When Windows 7 has installed it will not recognise the ULI ethernet controller. If Windows 7 can access the internet it will download a Microsoft Driver via update. If like me you connect via the LAN port you can try the ULI drivers available from the NVIDIA drivers page. I used this and it did not appear to work first time but after trying again it did load and I could use the LAN port as a connection.

After a few minutes Windows 7 went off and found the Realtek AC90 drivers for the sound itself.

Keep trying if you have problems as Windows 7 is just great and well worth the upgrade from XP.

I hope this helps, I just wish I had this info before I started the upgrade.

Andy

 

[lopri]

Very nice. Thank you for sharing your experience and many here will appreciate. You may want to check the following thread out.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2322429&enterthread=y

Welcome to AnandTech Forums.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had to connect a USB WiFi adaptor to the PC, install the (unsigned) 64-bit drivers, then I had to reboot and disable driver signing enforcement, but then I eventually got online, and then Win7 updated and found the ULI PCI LAN drivers, among other things. It also updated the WiFi USB driver to a signed one (RealTek G chipset).

 

[nemesismk2]

I found upgrading to Windows 7 from Asrock 939 Dual Sata2 to be very pain free.

 

[andyrpsmith]

Like to add a couple of other issues re this board.

I noticed that boot up had got longer in the phase 'please wait' before the final 'welcome' screen. In fact it was taking 30 secs in 'please wait' and also I was getting skipping at the end of music tracks with media player. Culprit the latest Realtek audio driver. Using performance monitor to view second by second boot up I could see windows opening and closing a specific registry key continuously for 30 secs. The key relates to the Sound Media installed by the Realtek driver. It drove me mad for days trying to fix it with no luck. So for about £12/$20 I bought a (From Novatech) C-Media PCI sound card and used Dogbert's open C-Media driver. Fantastic, 'please wait' down to about 2secs, no skipping towards end of tracks and has all functions of the onboard sound. If you use an external sound card you must disable the onboard sound in the BIOS or Windows 7 gets itself in a real mess by also downloading Realtek drivers and Uli drivers for AC97, becomes confused, and then disables the windows sound service so you have no sound at all!

The other nightmare is 4GB of RAM. (I'm running 32bit)
I decided to change from 4 x 512 DDR400 to 4 x 1GB DDR400 from Crucial.
On reboot BSOD. After two reboots and a windows boot repair finally got to the desktop only to have further BSOD when trying to do anything. BSOD varied from IRQL less than, memory management, XXX.sys messages. Clearly related to the Crucial memory.
Fixed this by going into BIOS and enabling Flexibility option for memory, this is disabled by default. Nightmare not over yet. Memory registered as 4GB in POST but windows reports 2GB. Cost me £100 to end up with 2GB as I had before!
If I take out 2 x 1GB from slots 3&4 and add back my old 2 x 512MB modules windows reports 2.5GB.
Update BIOS from 1.5 to 2.3 and add back the 2 x 1GB Crucial to 3&4 windows reports 2.5GB (turn on Memory Hole option now available with new BIOS version and it goes down to 2GB). I swap back to 2 x 512MB in 3&4 and windows reports 3GB, hurray the best combination yet. I'm sticking with this. My son has same mother board so I gave him the 2 x 1GB modules so we both have 3GB.

Anyone manage to see 4GB (in reality it will be about 3.5GB) with this motherboard?

Andy