Asus P4C800 Deluxe Problem

[Geocacheguy]

Howdy all,

I will start off by explaining how my comp worked before having a rock climbing accident, being away for 7 weeks and finally returning home to find the comp acting weirdly...

I have 3 hard drives, 2 Sata and one traditional ribbon cable type... ide. They are partitioned in varioius ways but I was not using any sort of RAID setup. No error messages ever and things worked fine.

Now, 7 weeks later, I get back and turn on the comp... first thing while the comp is booting up throught all the bios stuff, before XP begins, is I get a black screen saying something along the lines of :

CHECKING FOR SATA378 TX2PLUS (1.00.0.33)
NO DEVICE FOUND
BIOS NOT INSTALLED

Then WinXP begins to start and there are no problems until XP suddenly detects :

NEW MULTIMEDIA AUDIO CONTROLLER FOUND
NEW RAID CONTROLLER FOUND

and then XP pops up the windows to install the drivers for each (which I have cancelled because I have not installed any new hardware so I have no idea where these are coming from).

I live on my own so it is not as if anyone had access to my comp to muck around with it; and it was off the whole time I was away.

Any ideas why this might be happening and what I should do?

Funny thing is, after cancelling the device installation windows, XP seems to be working fine... all my drives/partitions are detected normally and I have not come across any issues other than these constant start up ones mentioned.

Thanks
Geo

PS I should mention, when this first occured, I went into the bios to check if anything was obviously wrong...

1. My boot order was different so I fixed that... funny thing is when selecting devices for boot order, one of the SATA drives is not showing up as an option.

2. Only thing I changed, assuming it was wrong since I don't use RAID, is under ADVANCED, the ONBOARD PROMISE CONTROLLER = ENABLED but the OPERATING MODE = RAID so I changed the OPERATING MODE = IDE ... Hope this was a proper thing to do.

3. My drive detections are as follows:

PRIMARY IDE MASTER = NOT DETECTED
PRIMARY IDE SLAVE = MAXTOR (my older drive)
SECONDARY IDE MASTER = PLEXTOR DVD R/W DRIVE
SECONDARY IDE SLAVE = ASUS CD DRIVE
THIRD IDE MASTER = ST3120026AS
FOURTH IDE MASTER = ST3120026AS

Oddly, that third and fourth masters are the same number... I seem to recall at one time they might have had an extra digit designation, such as ST3 and ST4. I hate relying on my memory.

 

[sipuncher]

Sounds as if the back up battery on your motherboard went flat while you were away. Due to this, the settings you changed from default in the bios have been lost, as you noted. Windows may detect the onboard devices as new hardware if any of the settings have changed, and new addresses have been assigned for things by plug and play. As a rule, if windows detects new hardware, just go with it! Don't try cancelling as it'll keep nagging about drivers and the devices in question may stop working.

As far as your RAID controller settings go, choosing IDE mode is correct as you haven't set up your drives in a RAID configuration.

Was the computer unplugged from the mains while you were away? The battery should fully recharge in 24 hours of being plugged in.

 

[Navid]

Is the time correct on your taskbar or in the BIOS?

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: sipuncher
The battery should fully recharge in 24 hours of being plugged in.

There is no rechargeable battery on that motherboard.

 

[Geocacheguy]

My computers clock is still correct. I was thinking about the battery having gone dry while I was gone but I believe this should have affected the clock.

My computer was still plugged into the power bar the whole time but the power bar was turned off.

Perhaps the battery is just approaching its end so it can't keep all settings correct??

 

[mechBgon]

If you're not using the onboard Promise controller, which is evidently the case judging by the fact that it detects no devices and yet your SATA drives work, then disable the Promise controller in the BIOS. It sounds like you're using the "native" SATA controller that's built into the Intel southbridge. The message you see is normal for the Promise in a scenario where it has no drives hooked up.