Asrock Dual SATA2 freezes/hangs when loading Windows

[Black Raven]

Hi all, a person (Begotten) recently posted a fix by removing all USB devices. I was able to fix my hard drive problems by disabling USB legacy support in the BIOS. I suggest to all the rest of you to give these a try.

Rick

 

[leecopson]

Setting up Hitachi HGST T7K250 as SATA2 on ASRock 939SLI-eSATA2 using Feature Tool.

I am posting this in reply to an existing posting, but it is written to be easy to locate via a search engine, and to be easy for newbies to understand. I have spent many weeks trying to get a SATA2 RAID config out of this mobo and 2 T7Ks and I'm hoping i can spare someone lese the aggravation.

I am not 100% clear whether the drives need to be partitioned/formatted for this to work. If your drives are not formatted and the below does not work then try formatting them. If you do not have access to a machine caoable of doing this then you can initiate a windows installation and create a partition and format from there.

I am fairly confident that the drives need to be at least partitioned, and possibly formatted, for the mobo's RAID utility to allow the drives to be selected.

1. Copy Feature Tool and create the bootable floppy
   Attach the drives to the Red or Orange SATA connectors. When in non-RAID mode these are the 3rd and 4th IDE Masters respectively. The Feature Tool appears to ONLY recognise SATA-connected drives when they can be identified as IDE Masters.
   Switch on and enter the BIOS
   Enter the BIOS Advanced tab and select IDE and ensure the SATA controller is enabled and set to non-RAID (default is Enabled and RAID)
   Place the Feature Tool diskette in the floppy drive and press PF10 to save BIOS changes and exit
   If required enter the BIOS Advanced tab and select IDE to confirm that the drives were recognised and then exit BIOS setup.
   The Feature Tool should now recognise the drives and allow the settings to be changed. Upgrading to SATA2 requires spread Spectrum to be explicitly Enabled or Disabled before changes will take effect. You will receive a confirmation when the tool has successfully changed the SATA setting.
   If you wish to retain the Orange and Red SATA connectors for eSATA2 devices you can now switch the drives to the Black (3rd IDE Slave) and Blue (4th IDE Slave) SATA connectors.
   You can now enter the BIOS to switch the SATA controller to RAID or AHCI if so desired.

 

[grooge]

just to let you know that this board(rev. 1.04) run Vista very well, with an AGP AIW 9600. I got it installed on a PATA HDD connected to SATA1 with a parrallel to serial adaptor.

I installed the lastest Vista build right on, no problem. I do have good PSU thou... but some generic Samsung memory. I never had any problem with this board so far..

 

[qsrk]

It's been a few months since I RMA'd the motherboard, and it was working flawlessly until yesterday. I got two successive cold boot errors after the machine was off for ~8 hours. It booted fine on the third try. I'll run an HDD test just in case. Still running 1.50 BIOS.

 

[StormRider]

Originally posted by: alternated
I have used both SATA 1 and 2 (I have a Seagate 80gb SATA Baracuda HD), and it still hangs when I get to that point. It does it when I use an IDE HD as well (in both IDE1 and 2).

It just freezes. If i press the Num Lock or Caps Lock nothing happens, so I think it freezes.

I saw another user with the exact same problem in another forum. Are you using a USB keyboard? Try using a PS/2 keyboard instead.

According to this user the computer did not freeze up. Instead, the motherboard just stopped working with the USB keyboard at that exact same point in his install. He thought it froze up too and wasted time by swapping around all his components (harddrives, ide cables etc) trying to diagnose the problem.

What was perplexing was that the USB keyboard worked after turning on the computer. He could get to the bios screen, enable booting to the CD by pressing a key but once he got to the WinXP setup screen to reformat the hard drive, the keyboard stopped working. Using a PS/2 keyboard enabled him to install Windows XP...