ECS A780GM-A Won't Install XP on SATA Drive

[rkoenn]

I have a new ECS A780GM-A motherboard and cannot get the SATA hard drive to install and boot XP. I have a PATA DVD drive attached, 2x2GB OCZ memory, Saphire Radeon PCIEx video, and WD 250 GB SATA drive on port 1. I can run the installation routine from the CD and it formats the drive, installs the XP files, reboots and returns to the CD installation. I have attempted a forced boot from the hard drive with no success. I also installed XP on an old PATA Quantum drive and it worked correctly. I flashed the BIOS to the latest version and that did not fix the problem. One thing I do notice is during the POST I do not see the SATA drive show up and going into the BIOS setup the first SATA port shows no drive until I go into the submenu. Then the drive shows up with a message about new device discovered and reboot required. However even when I acknowledge this it still refuses to boot. I also attempted to Ghost the PATA drive onto the SATA and Ghost does not recognize the SATA drive as being attached. The problem seems to be with the BIOS detecting the SATA drive initially for it to boot. Any ideas are welcome. I have contacted ECS and they have not responded in over 2 weeks. I built a system using this board over the summer and that one worked fine.

 

[Old Hippie]

Sounds like you have the BIOS set to use the drives in SATA/AHCI/RAID mode.

Look around in there and set the drives to IDE mode.

 

[rkoenn]

Well I did discover one thing. I moved the hard drive to SATA 2 instead of SATA 1 and lo and behold the machine recognizes it immediately and it booted off the drive and into the XP install. It sounds to me though as if there may be something wrong with the board, not a perfect board. I am wondering if I should return it and get another as the previous machine I built with this board did not do this. It is annoying that it would do this and if ECS provided me with an explanation that might do it. But I think I am going to return the board as I will sell the system I build with these components.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It does sound like there is something wrong with the SATA port 1 on hte mobo.