Bios flash fixed it ...Strange Problem with Asus P5A motherboards

[jyates]

Hi all,

I bought a couple of Asus P5A motherboards from a fellow the other day and they
came in today.

He had said that he thought one of them had a problem with the IDE ports detecting
a hard drive. I mainly wanted them just to test out some AMD K6 2 processors I had
laying around and the motherboards weren't very much money at all.

I checked both of them out. One is a P5A Rev 1.04 and the other is a Rev. 1.06. From
what I can see they both have the newest bios flash 1.07 on them.

I never could get either board to detect a 40gb or 60gb hard drive. I had it set
to auto detect. When the system booted it would get to detecting primary master and just
stopped there. I swapped the IDE cable over to the secondary IDE port and it got to detecting
secondary master and just stopped there.

I put a 8.4gb hard drive on them and some smaller ones and they detected them just
fine. I don't have any more drives in size between the 8.4gb and the 40gb so I can tell
where the "cut off point" is.

I used a regular 40 pin IDE and 80 pin IDE cable on both boards and they just wouldn't ever
detect the bigger drives.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Jim

 

[NesuD]

were those 40 and 60 gig drives Western digitals by chance? Some WD drives of those sizes had a timing issue with certain boards although i never heard of the problem with boards that old. the trick to making them work was to cut the pin 1 wire in the ide cable. first 2 wires on the 80 wire cable. This worked for me with a 60 gi wd i had on an msi nforce2 board. the problem also cropped up with a couple of via based athlon boards and an Asus p4 board if i remember right.

 

[Peter]

Known bug in Award BIOSes before 6/99. These hang at drive detection whenever they see a drive larger than 32 GiB.

 

[AndyHui]

Try the latest BIOS for this board, Version 1011 Beta 005. It's from 2002, so it should have resolved the bug that Peter mentioned.

For all boards that are no longer fully supported by ASUS, any further BIOS development usually remains in beta status, although in my experience they have been perfectly stable.

 

[Peter]

Beta in this case means they're compiling the BIOSes, but no longer putting them through QA testing.

As for the release dates, unfortunately they aren't really a sign of the BIOS core code having the bug or not - there are plenty of post-6/99 BIOSes out there that don't use the updated IDE handling. It's always worth trying, though, particularly if there is something that much newer available.

 

[jyates]

Thanks guys....I think you are on target with the drive size issue.
I downloaded the beta bios and we'll see if it will flash and fix
the issue.

The drives I tried were WD and IBM and Seagate branded.

Will report back how it comes out.

Thanks,
Jim

 

[jyates]

Bios flash fixed it right up. It detected a 60gb IBM
hard drive just fine!

Thanks for all the help!

Jim